Has anyone heard of the new Sport Pilot program? Basically, it's a brand-new pilot rule created by the FAA that lets you fly at half the cost of a traditional pilot license. No medical needed--if you can drive a car, you can fly an airplane! You can become a sport pilot with as little as 20 hours of flight instruction. You can fly a one or two-seater aircraft capable of speeds up to 138mph. And in most cases, you can pass the medical requirements just by showing your driver's license! That's not all...

Now you can:
1.) Obtain an FAA pilot certificate at a lower cost and with less time commitment than ever before.
2.) Fly a sport pilot-eligible aircraft with your driver's license serving as evidence of medical eligibility.
3.) Purchase new, more affordable, ready-to-fly aircraft.
4.) Make your dreams of flying come true more easily and less expensively.
5.) Fly interesting alternative aircraft such as powered parachutes, weight shift-controlled (trikes), gliders, gyroplanes, or balloons.
6.) Maintain your own aircraft

Anyone here going to try this program out? My friend just trained in Texas and he said he was certified under 21 hours and only paid a total of $2,300!


It's cool cuz you can pick basically any type of plane you want and either build it or have a factory build it for you. Here are some photos of the various aircraft available for purchase: http://www.sportpilot411.com

But, doesn't it sound too good to be true? I mean, is it safe to only train for under 20 hours?

It ends up being more expensive when you do get around getting a real PPL.

It's a bizarre type of flying.. as there are so many airports you cannot fly in/out of.. and the ones that you do/can.. you end up being a nuisance/danger.. I personally wouldn't want to share time in the pattern with someone trying to short-cut their way into the air..

There are hang-gliders, ultra-lights and farm fields for dare-devils.

Sorry if that's "snobby" but I think it's a poor solution to a problem that never existed.


Edit :  I'm all for new, innovative, economical, inexpensive aircraft..  I'm just not crazy about "untrained" pilots whizzing around, up there with me, or over my house 

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I'm sorry to hear that...

Ultra-lights themselves, aren't dangerous. It's the mindset that goes with flying them. There's just a much smaller "weather" window in which to fly them and no "real" reason, other than being airborne for the fun of it.. They're just an amplification of what worries me about this Sport Pilot thing. Flying isn't a sport. It's deadly serious business.

Ironically, to me.. the lighter and less forgiving, more at the whim of weather a plane is.. THE MORE QUALIFIED AND EXPERIENCED the pilot should be. You can get yourself into trouble VERY quickly when the margin for error is tiny.

This Sport Pilot Deal has trouble written all over it. 

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Do you think that number will go up for Sport Pilots ?

Is it maybe only 1% 'cause there are so many people NOT flying for medical reasons (that will be flying under Sport Pilot) ?

I can think of a handful of people right now (never even bothered to take a lesson by my advice) that aren't flying, but could fly, under Sport Pilot.

The whole thing is creepy. Lower the medical standards; Lower the training standards... *sigh*..

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Same place we'd be with anything that went from it's earliest, experimental phases.. on into mainstream, regulated status.

When people were first inventing cars.. it was a free-for-all..  No laws, no standards.. hardly any roads. In order for it to have become commonplace and safe.. well.. you get the idea 

Sport Pilots won't be pioneering anything.. Except maybe giving crash investigators lots of practice.

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Believe you me, brother, that was my first thought. But consider the stats for glider and ultralight pilots (OK, glider pilots )... hard to say if it's easier or harder to get into trouble in a glider (depends on the situation),  but they seem to do better per # of flights, not just per year. And the vast majority of really nasty powered-aircraft accidents involve fairly high-time pilots, often with advanced ratings; this is not news. So it's hard to say if there will be a spate of Sport Pilots biting off more than they can chew. just because they are turned loose with less hours.
As long as the instructors come up with  a way to provide full training within the scope of the SP requirements, as opposed to giving half the normal training, we could see some good pilots out there soon. We were all clueless noobs at one point, and now look at us: World's Greatest Pilot, every one of us.
 And when the reality of the restrictions kick in for many of these SP applicants, they'll probably go for their PP.


At any rate, I'm not too worried about it.

Yeah .. I'm probably over-reacting. I'm guilty of "mentor" influence.. The pilot I admire most is one of those 30,000+ hour guys who insurance companies seek out deliberately when their wealthy clients buy newer, bigger, faster planes. He's done it all.. seen it all..

If you even mention this Sport Pilot stuff around him, you can see his veins start popping out.. and it will take quite a bit of finnessing on your part to win his respect back.

Pilots have always been kinda a self-policing lot. Sure.. the FAA does what it can, being a bloated, corrupt, government agency and all, but it's really up to "us" to keep the skies safe. There's a reason air-travel IS so safe (even light G/A) and this stuff seems to fly in the face of that success..

Anyways... Glider pilots never take to the air unless the weather, by definition, suits the flight.. and a regular pilot's worst nightmare (engine failure) is a given.. going in. Those high-time, well qulaified pilots have accidents 'cause they GO places. If they were never outside of gliding range from their intended field of landing.. or never flew in less than ideal weather.. imagine how rarely they'd crash.

Being a bit elitist about my paltry PPSEL myself, I admit I share similar misgivings...I feel like the member of some snooty club who suddenly has to be nice to abunch of "unworthies", but although X-C travel, whether under IFR or VFR, contributes to the accident figures for PPs, there are a tremendous number of accidents in the pattern at uncontrolled fields on CAVU days every year. They involve pilots of every description and level of experience. And they're not always midairs. My "favorite", for want of a better word, involved two high-time ATPs, both airline captains, who co-owned a Stearman and went up one day together for some pattern work. Something minor went wrong (don't remember what it was), and what would most likely have become a minor incident became a horrible stall-spin accident...because, as it was determined later, they started fighting each other for control. Imagine that... two guys who came up through the old-school training system, got all the ratings, lived with airline-standard CRM procedures every day on the job for years... fighting over the stick like a coupla panicky greenhorns. Amazing.
Not condemning them... it takes guts to relax and let the designated PIC do his/her thing in an emergency; I might've done the same thing. Maybe they hadn't settled who was "in charge" before the flight began:  if so, however, that was mistake #1.
But that's my point: inadequate training or experience can lead to mishaps, but having more training or experience does not always protect us.

It could very well turn out that the sport-pilot crowd turns in better statistics, given their limitations... those limitations should, in theory, eliminate a major cause of GA accidents: continued flight into IMC by unrated, inexperienced, or unequipped pilots.
I think it's a chance worth taking, because recreational GA and the world of FBOs and all associated businesses need all the help they can get right now... without more affordable access to the air for more people, in more fuel-efficient aircraft, that whole world will probably fade away in our lifetimes.