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What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

pilotinstitute.com

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Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#191

Post by civilitty »

oceanplexian wrote: post #134
taneq wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the same as de-registering the car? In Australia if you have a car that you don't intend to drive on the road, you can just hand the number plates back. They refund the remainder of your licensing fees and you're done. The car can still be driven (even without a driver's license) on private land, just not public roads. If you want to drive it on the road again, you have to re-register it and get it inspected.

The California DMV hates people who own cars with a passion. I moved out of California and forgot to inform them, so 2 years later they levied my bank account for $500 of unpaid vehicle registration fees. Oh yeah, registering a car costs several hundred dollars per year.

You’re lying. California DMV doesn’t have that power. It never did.

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#192

Post by AdrianB1 »

golwengaud wrote: post #12

Setting the legalities aside, flying any of these without the training behind a pilot's license sounds like a great way to have some fun, right up until you have a really bad day. Maybe you can skip the license---I haven't looked at those regs myself---but you can't skip the skills. (I'd also want to take a hard look at the design, parts, and maintenance before I flew something like this---but I don't really have the…

They are the only thing an old pilot can continue to fly after they can no longer pass a strict medical check. For this purpose, they are perfect. For random people trying to fly without training they are a natural selection tool.

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#193

Post by AdrianB1 »

pests wrote: post #124
AdrianB1 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can bet that people that fly these planes without a license also don't spend the time and money to get a radio license; that automatically prevents from flying to or from a towered airport. These ultra-light planes are practically big toys that you can fly over some empty field and relatively low altitudes. Powered parachutes also fall in this category.

I watch a creator on YT who regularly takes his paramotor (a powered parachute) across town and on longer trips. He also takes it up to at least 15k feet. That seems vastly more than empty fields and low altitudes.

15k feet is not G class airspace (uncontrolled) in most of the world, that means you need radio contact with FIR, radio license, training etc. This is not your regular ultralight.

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#194

Post by MaxikCZ »

shakow wrote: post #62
NikolaNovak wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People's instinct and intuition are EXTREMELY incorrect in situation of your sight obscured while flying an airplane (and untrained and even trained personnel are extremely ill-equipped to judge their spatial awareness and capabilities in blind situations). People end up trusting their body reflexes that have evolved for very different situation and absolutely lie to you. When an airplane turns, the actual G forces u…

Probably a stupid question, but why can't these lost pilots just maintain their attitude indicator in the middle, fly straight, grit their teeth, and wait to get out of the cloud?

As a glider pilot, artificial horizont is very rare. All you got is speed, vertical speed, altimeter.

Once blind, your first prio is to keep the speed and vertical speed indicator constant. The problem is, without artificial horizont you cant really tell your bank angle, and your feelings just straight up lie to you. So you think you going straight, but suddenly your speed starts increasing. So you think "I am prolly nose diving a bit", and pull to compensate, only for speed to not decrease as much as youd like (or not at all), and suddenly you feel you are pulling 3g, and then you notice your altitude is dropping like crazy.

Thats how you get into diving spiral, and worst thing is you still have no idea if you are spiraling left or right. Keep it up for few more seconds and you can easily exceed safe speed, which given the g-forces is much lower than actual maximum speed in clean air. And a second or two later your first wing decides to go different direction than the rest of the plane.

I tested this with my instructor once, where we flew into a cloud just slightly above its bottom edge, with the goal of "try to fly trough it", only to find myself spinning out of the bottom with exactly this situation. We were prepared with brakes, lots of space beneath us and cleared general area of other planes, and checked beforehand theres no themral beneath to suck us higher, but that memory clearly showed how unintuitive and dangerous flying trough clouds often is.

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#195

Post by entropy47 »

andersrs wrote: post #182
entropy47 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> creating a bunch of noise and emissions just so they can have fun Wait until you hear about parents! I haven't actually done the maths but I expect an ultralight is comparable to a car hobbyist in both noise and emissions. Agree that flying a jet liner for fun would be a dick move.

Yeah I hate those kind of people as well when they are noisy. Is that supposed to be an argument?

Yes. I think my core thesis is that if noise and pollution upsets you, then I would spend less time complaining about a niche hobby that barely effects anybody, and a lot more time getting annoyed about really common hobbies, business patterns and lifestyle choices that are destroying the planet.

And I think the obvious counter is "that's whataboutism, you can care about lots of things at once" but I personally am pretty fatigued with just causes, so when I see people complaining about hobby aviation in ultralights I just see it as a distraction that pulls time, focus and attention from bigger problems.

All of this is, of course, completely subjective. But that was the intent behind the comment.

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#196

Post by Dalewyn »

flangola7 wrote: post #186
Dalewyn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAA's regulations are draconian, but they are that way because they are written in blood. When shit goes south, it doesn't matter whether you're a private or commercial pilot. Your plane is coming down regardless, and worst case you might take some other people with you to the other side. More than anything, flying is a luxury compared to something like driving which is a practical necessity or sailing which carries…

This is thinking-shaped text. ChatGPT has better intelligence than this.

I literally have no idea what you're saying, did you ask ChatGPT for an insulting line? At least the other guy[1] was slightly thoughtful about the insult, relatively speaking.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36744872

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#197

Post by Dalewyn »

trevyn wrote: post #177
Dalewyn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAA's regulations are draconian, but they are that way because they are written in blood. When shit goes south, it doesn't matter whether you're a private or commercial pilot. Your plane is coming down regardless, and worst case you might take some other people with you to the other side. More than anything, flying is a luxury compared to something like driving which is a practical necessity or sailing which carries…

Excellent second-grade analysis of the situation.

The leading cause of aviation accidents and incidents is pilot error[1]. So to try and prevent as many of them as possible, there is a very good reason to be exceedingly stringent and draconian about pilot certification.

[1]: https://pilotinstitute.com/aviation-accident-causes/#:~:text....

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#198

Post by kotaKat »

Dalewyn wrote: post #85
grepfru_it wrote: post #73

Unpopular opinion but technically correct answer: you can fly any plane without a pilots license. In fact I just saw a Quora question with this exact question and the answer came from a 60 year old pilot that has been flying without a license for 30 years. If you never fly out of a major airport where an FAA inspector can ramp check you, who will ever find out? Please don’t do this.

In the same vein, the only reason you need a license is because you use publicly owned space. For a mundane example, consider your driver's license. You only need it because you drive on public roads and highways; a driver's license is a license stating you are competent enough to not ruin the shared public roads and highways. Likewise, a pilot's license is a license stating you are competent enough to not ruin the s…

> So if you take your car on a drive on your own, private land, you don't need a driver's license

This is actually one of the reasons that Phantom Auto [phantom.auto] started with remote controlling cars - and while they still do, they pivoted a lot of their work towards industry driving forklifts and terminal tractors that live on private property and don't need regulation on remote operation.

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#199

Post by ryanmercer »

flangola7 wrote: post #185
godelski wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E.g. If you have been professionally diagnosed with ADHD, the FAA bans you from any pilot's license ever, even a student license Not quite true. They just need you to be evaluated where you've been off medication for at least 90 days. But if you're on Adderall, you're shit out of luck. Which is pretty dumb since the medication resolves issues. Other dumb things that will/can prevent you from getting your license: A…

I don't understand the 90 days part. Why would someone discontinue the medication that controls their symptoms? I have ADHD and take Adderall, and plan to pursue a recreational/personal license next year.

I'm guessing because a Google search of "Adderall side effects" immediately returned this:

"Rare but severe side effects of Adderall can include emotional instability, psychiatric disorders and cardiovascular events. Adderall misuse can lead to seizures and death."

Re: What planes can you fly without a pilot’s license?

#200

Post by user_7832 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #156
pkilgore wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment contributes nothing. There are multiple levels of licensing with multiple levels of medical clearances. Someone on controlled ADHD medication, diabetes, or high BMI is perfectly capable of managing risk of flying as a private pilot same as boating or driving. They probably shouldn't be airline transport pilots, but that's not really under discussion. It seems like your goal here is to start some sort of…

FAA's regulations are draconian, but they are that way because they are written in blood. When shit goes south, it doesn't matter whether you're a private or commercial pilot. Your plane is coming down regardless, and worst case you might take some other people with you to the other side. More than anything, flying is a luxury compared to something like driving which is a practical necessity or sailing which carries…

> FAA's regulations are draconian, but they are that way because they are written in blood.

Could you give an example of a case where there was an incident because of a pilot’s diabetes or some other similar condition?

Should folks with a family history of heart attacks also be then stopped from flying? Where do you draw the line of “this health condition is significant enough”?

I’m not sure if you are familiar with medical conditions but things like diabetes can be managed quite well to the point of being nearly trivial (in terms of its negative effects.)

> "Diversity" has no place in aviation, either you can fly safely or you can't. People with conditions are presumed they can't, for very good reasons.

This has nothing to do with diversity (and why the quotes)? Medical conditions could be classified as a disability but I don’t understand what that has to do with diversity.

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