A couple of weeks ago, I took a member of this forum, flying in my Drifter! He`d never flown in an Ultralight and wanted to find out if Ultralight flying was what he really wanted to do, well, the easiest way to put it is he was immediately hooked.
A couple of nights ago he phoned me and said he had done a fair bit of research and had decided he wanted to start flight training, own an aircraft and it had to be a tail dragger so he could fly it out of paddocks... He was told by one RA-Aus flying school that they hadn`t had a tail dragger for years as no one wanted to learn to fly in tail draggers,anymore.
The way I see it is this! The majority of RA-Aus pilots are around retirement age and over! For whatever reason, a great number of them have come from a GA background! They have enough disposable money to train in and fly modern LSA`s! A large number of them own their own LSA, so for those guys the cost of flying doesn`t really matter very much, but if the cost of training and owning an aircraft continues the way it`s currently going, it`s only a matter of time and it will certainly become a sport for a chosen few! That is not what many guys like SSCBD and myself intended, when we started flying Ultralights.
Electric aircraft may be the way of the future but for now, we are stuck in the present!
An alternative??? Airdrome Aeroplanes ~ Holden, MO
Frank.