UL is nation based and I don´t like it. (and all UL folks are now hating me). But current Europe and Schengen is opening a lot of opportunities and having national variation and permutations will not help. Well, I might be effected by being a small country citizen where you can´t plot 2 hours on a single heading without crossing border, but still.
weight and nonsence – agree weight is not everything and not completely correct. but Weight with PROPER sped limitations (on both ends, not only stall speed) is creating an a proper envelope. the same discussion was going on (and may be still goes on) on unmanned vehicles where 150 kg was established as an artificial limit of Europe wide regulations and all the folks are trying to set up limit what is model aircraft with limited impact and what is not. Is it 7 kg ? 8kg ? 10kg? Impact energy is not the best I can imagine but good enough I would say
450 versus 600 – it´s about marketing and cost – not technical side. There is no doubt 450 machine can be lighter than 600 – but does it pay off to have different airframe? when is comes to 450 kg machine few kilos “are ok” – as almost everybody who place 2 folks into cockpit is overweight anyway….
I will not hate you for preferring supra-national regulation, not at all! Only it must be feared that if ever there comes an EASA ultralight regulation, it will be an OR of all present limitations in the various countries, rather than an AND of all privileges. Leading to my belief that microlight fliers better keep a low profile and be happy with what they have, things will never get better than they are now, in most countries.
Fully agree with your idea of combining weight limits with speed limits, and also about the 450/600 kg argument being purely commercial.
Not for the first time in aviation history, the US have patiently waited for us Europeans to sort the bugs out, then came up with something quite ok: the US’an LSA ruling.
EASA will not touch UL or experimental. They could of course have made some “classes” for both, in principle, but to what purpose? UL is completely deregulated anyway, it is not something the national aviation authorities handles (with a couple of exceptions). Experimentals and Annex II are handled so different from place to place (even regarding the basic philosophy) that EASA wouldn’t know how and where to start.
Regarding limits, weight, speed, wing loading and so on, I think this is much more complex than it looks. What has shown to spark development like nothing we have seen in light aviation anywhere, anytime, is the UL limits. Max 450/475 kg MTOW and max 65 km/h stall speed. I don’t know exactly how those limits came to be, but I think it was originally to constrain UL to motorized cloth and tube kind of contraptions that started to fly in the 70s and 80s, powered hang gliders and similar things. People soon discovered that real aircraft could be made within these limits, and with the Rotax 912 as powerplant, it could only go one way.
The US-LSA rules have had an opposite effect. I believe the reason for this is the limits on top speed, no retractable gear and no CS propeller. Maybe the Americans had some romantic idea of Cub-like aircraft flying around at sun set. What has happened is that US-LSA aircraft are almost exclusively crippled European microlights (no retracts, no CS, low top speed), but with more usable weight. That added usable weight aren’t all that important anyway, when 90% of flying is done solo. The US-LSA rules has sparked no development, no new cool airplanes except some kits, that would have worked excellent as pure experimentals anyway. The US LSA is no success. Only the limit on MTOW (600 kg) makes sense, even though it is not all that important.
The key is obviously to set some limits that constrains the aircraft to a “manageable size”. At the same time those limits must not constrain the technological development. The European UL regulations – perfect (relatively speaking). The US-LSA – worthless.
