James Lawrence

In case you hadn’t heard, this is the Year of the Cub…the 75th anniversary celebration of that wonderful proto-LSA, the Piper J3 Cub. Of course, I’m excusing my post on the FAA-certified J3 here because it is also legal to fly as a Sport Pilot, along with many other venerable Golden Age flivvers. I fly […]

Ben Sclair, who publishes General Aviation News, wrote a nicely thought out piece on the nuances of the high cost of flying, with a focus on LSA in particular. He laments the black/white thinking that permeates such discussions and makes a decent case for that time-worn truism, if you really want to do something, you’ll […]

The Federal Aviation Administration just released a document about its assessment regarding the performance of the LSA industry, specifically in regard to LSA producer’s, shall we say, sub-par performance toward compliance with the ASTM airworthiness standard set out in the very definition of the Light Sport category. In a nutshell, the primary offense of several […]

I’ve been a (budget) international jet setter the last couple months so figured it was time to update through an e-chat with Chris “Doc” Bailey, who’s heading up a hydra-like push at Renegade Light Sport to get the Lycoming IO-233-LSAengine in as many birds as possible. I’ve talked before about the many-pronged attack Doc and […]

Although we Sport Pilots only have to self-certify (and have a driver’s license) to legally fly Light Sport Aircraft, the success of the self-certification “medical” has no doubt factored into AOPA and EAA’s joint proposal to FAA to expand the concept to include Private Pilots. To add your comments to the FAA page about such […]

This is pretty cool, I have to say: a flying…what, waterbike? Winged pontoon? Powered box kite? Here’s the home page for Flynano: and doesn’t this supremely giddy pilot in the illustration remind you of U2’s Bono? Hmmm…backer? Person of Interest? Is Lindsay Lohan going to buy one? Stay tuned… A year ago, I wrote about […]

* REVISED June 21: Missing text at end replaced. * Some big news developing recently regarding the European Aviation Safety Agency’s (EASA) certification of the first three light sport aircraft in its new category designed to legitimize ASTM-certified LSA. The new category is called EASA CS-LSA. We’ve talked about it before, see below, but this […]

Catching up from the road after 3 weeks (1 day to go) in Hamburg, Germany on family business and a laptop double-meltdown (don’t ask). The Sling is a South African LSA that made a splash in 2009 with a ’round-the-world flight just received its official S-LSA Airworthiness certificate, making it #125 on the official list. […]

Just a few short months ago I posted an announcement from Pipistrel about its upcoming, mid-$80K ALPHA Trainer, targeted for flight schools and already bought in significant quantities by the Indian Air Force as a military primary trainer. ALPHA was promised for April, and Pipistrel nailed it — how often do we see that in […]

Somebody at the L.A. Times has got a sweet tooth for the flying car, specifically the Terrafugia Transition SLSA-legal “roadable” airplane. No less than six feature articles about flying cars have appeared in the prestigious newspaper’s online edition in the last month alone, in departments as diverse as Business, U.S., Nation Now, Tech Now and […]