Switzerland requires permit on all foreign ultralights (and other countries doing similar stuff)

Mooney_Driver wrote:

The question however for any rule is what kind of risk/safety balance it creates.

LeSving wrote:

The issue is rather why make regulations where no regulations are necessary?

One has to keep in mind where UL is coming from and what UL is meant for.

From the very beginning the idea was not that somebody in the CAA said “I agree that GA is overregulated so let’s create a parallel GA with all the good things but just less regulation”.

It was rather somebody asking: “If I just want to fly circles around my local field in nothing more than a motorized hang-glider, why do I have to fulfill all these requirements made for people flying hundreds of miles away in bad weather, etc.?”
And the CAA answer to that request was (surprisingly enough): “Well, if you just want to do this, we can actually imagine to drop many of the regulations wich are not required for this kind of activities”.

This worked fine for quite some time, but as always (that’s human nature) people started to bend the boundaries of the regulations. Just taking weight as an example: When the UL regulations were introduced, the aircraft available in this category had an empty weight of <200kg, could carry only 2 people and therefore nobody even thought about 472 kg MTOW being a realistic limitation. But as this was set as a limit (you have to set some limit to avoid that people want to fly 747s as ultralight) manufacturers gradually started to build planes with >300kg or even >350kg empty weight – and rather than blaming the manufacturers to build designs that obviously are unsuitable for an UL category the pilots started to pretend “we are forced to fly overweight due to the regulation”.
Same with international flights: ULs have never been thought of as long range travel airplanes. Crossing the alps from Germany to Italy might have been an undertaking for the “adventurous few” – comparable to an Atlantic crossing in a SEP – but definitely nothing one would do regularly on a Saturday afternoon.
Therefore the limitation to national flights (with the benefit of much simpler regulation as nothing had to be aligned transnationally), has only been a concern to very few pilots who live so close to an international border that the circle around the local airfield touches the other countries’ airspace.

Those ULs based in Switzerland, which @Dan is referring to, are registered as so-called “Ecolights” and need to be HB-registered.

No, I’m not referring to those…
I guess you guys flying desks or getting all excited on gliding down the ILS in IMC don’t visit the smaller fields, nor experience the lighter side of GA

Malibuflyer wrote:

Can’t disagree more! That’s the old “everything we don’t like is a safety issue” line of reasoning.
Weight limitation for UL? Safety issue because it forces pilots to fly overweight
No IFR for UL? Safety issue because it forces pilots too fly VFR in IMC
Taxation on aviation fuel? Safety issue because it makes pilots to gain less practice

+1 on that @Malibuflyer
That is the super advantage GA has over automobiles… YOU make most of your safety!

PS
“most of your safety”… pondering about that, as 2 hours ago had a pretty close head-on encounter with a Mooney at 4.2Kft S of Zurich… I’m ADSB and Flarm, but I guess some people are still flying around in stealth mode… 🧐

Malibuflyer wrote:

One has to keep in mind where UL is coming from and what UL is meant for.

Good analysis @Malibuflyer.

I agree, the original idea was to generate a class of flying machines (I’d hesitate to call those initial things airplanes) which can be flown outside the very restrictive regime of normal GA.

Only, what is today offered as UL’s has nothing to do with that anymore. These things are high tech airframes which have one simple goal: To stay outside the regulation for certified airplanes. However, for all proper purposes, they ARE airplanes and quite a few of them are more capable than their certified brothers and sisters. Yet, they are still in a virtually unregulated environment. Licensing is outside the hands of the CAA’s.

We all know the shortcomings of this. Low training, no real build control, no medical requirements in some places, constant overloaded planes and a less than stellar safety record.

The same goes to an extent for Experimentals, even though the difference there is that they need to be flown by fully licensed pilots, LAPL or PPL being the minimum.

For me, the whole story about why e.g in the US lots of people go the experimental way and in Europe people go the UL way is clear: They want to get outside the certified framework, for cost, modern designs for a fraction of certified price and license requirements which are a lot less effort than doing a PPL.

So exactly what you say was not the intention has happened: We have created a totally separate class of airplanes which have not much if anything in common with certified GA. In the US, that are the experimentals, here it’s UL’s.

And why this happened is also clear: Overregulation and the 1980ties liability scam crisis in the US which led to a complete meltdown in certification of new stuff and totally insane pricing of new certified airplanes. It is practically impossible today to certify ground breaking technology without going bust at least once, without investing 20 years of development into something which may look new but is in essence a 50 year old design propped up with massively overpriced gadgets.

And now, some national CAA’s wish to ban those things. Is anyone surprised? If it is in their power, they will.

Personally, if I see one way of rectifying this, we would need a totally rewritten code of certification both for airplanes up to 2 tons and around and licensing to match the demand those airplanes have on the pilots who fly them. Throw out the classifications of UL, experimental, what ever other rule avoidance schemes and call a duck a duck: If it flies, has an engine and people inside it’s most likely an airplane. So it requires a license to operate (not a doctorate, a license to fly) and certification rules which allow progress without a cya no risk policy targeted mostly at avoiding frivolous law suits. We need certification rules which allow prices like UL’s and experimentals for ALL GA airplanes of similar sizes certified under a common sensible rule, we need licenses to match that and we need a stop to frivolous legitation against manufacturers in the very country where people are sooo mature and crave responsibility… until something happens. Can’t have both.

Frans wrote:

So please tell me where I can find those foreign-registered ultralights, and I will for sure take a look.

No, I will not.
I will say no more on this subject, and leave you guys to debate about the cons and pros of what you think you know so well…

Quite simply, ICAO “certification” is a quid pro quo for overflight and other rights.

Each ICAO contracting state retains absolute sovereignity within its airspace, and is free to implement its own categories of “flying machines” and “deregulated FCL” to go with them.

You just don’t get “ICAO protection”.

Lots of people don’t like this, some pretending it doesn’t exist, that ECAC is some supra-national body, etc, but that is the deal. The fact that there are agreements between a bunch of countries to allow overflight of non-certs is a bonus, and, to quote this fine old chap it is a privilege, not a right

We live in an increasingly nationalist Europe. Yes; “nationalist” is a dirty word, but that’s the reality. What is today called the “EU” was set up partly to prevent this and to eventually turn Europe into one uniform region, one country, but it has failed, and lots of politicians are re-examining old concessions and old relationships. The arrival of CV19 and the “vaccine business” in particular have dramatically highlighted European nationalism, often in a pretty distasteful “yes we know this stinks but we don’t care what anybody thinks” manner, and accelerated this process.

What this will do to the “200k €” ULs is an interesting debate. Many report that they are toys which rarely fly too far, but they are still bought to tick off a dream of flying around Europe (nobody buys a plane for local burger runs as the objective) and there is now a big “no-UL zone” in the middle of Europe and covering much of the most scenic parts.

Has there been a significant issue with French UL pilots with no medicals (legal in France) venturing into Switzerland?

Off topic posts about special crew authorisation airports moved here

Peter wrote:

We live in an increasingly nationalist Europe. Yes; “nationalist” is a dirty word, but that’s the reality. What is today called the “EU” was set up partly to prevent this and to eventually turn Europe into one uniform region, one country, but it has failed,

While in general I agree on a trend towards nationalism, two thoughts on that:
- Switzerland (as UK) is not EU so whatever Switzerland does is not an indicator for whether EU works or not
- One could argue that the opposite of what you say is true: What is currently happening is not an indication that EU has failed but rather that it actually works as intended. EU was never meant to act like a single national state but always as an association of sovereign nations that harmonize some areas for mutual benefit but do not harmonize others where the mutual benefit is too small.
This is exactly what happened in regulation of aviation with the help of EASA: Some areas are harmonized and therefore regulated supranationally while others have been consciously kept in the sole individual responsibility of each member state.
What is happening now is nothing more than that some of the member states “remind” the pilots of this very fact. UL/Microlight regulation is a national thing and that amongst other things implies that you must not do regulation arbitrage by registering your UL in a country where you like the regulations better but operate it still in your home country. Btw. Germany has issued a very similar statement just recently.

Mooney_Driver wrote:

Only, what is today offered as UL’s has nothing to do with that anymore.

Agree! The rational reaction of the regulators now would be to say: “UL has developed from the original idea of flying around the local spire to an international means of transportation therefore we need to apply the same regulation as for normal airplanes”.
If you tell your child they have to go to bed at 8 (or depending on age “have to be at home by 11, etc.”) and they start to bend this rule by testing what happens if they don’t move until 8:05, 8:10, etc. you would also tell them “the rule is 8:00” and not “so obviously 8:00 is too early therefore you are allowed until 9” (and then 10, 11, …)

This issue will never go away because nobody will pay 10-20k for the license and the ability to fly around the spire A lot of people do the PPL as a bucket list item but most of those who actually buy some hardware are doing it to fulfil a dream of some sort.

The politics behind this move would be interesting – like the politics behind this one which seems to have been coordinated UK-France. There is more and more of this coming, around Europe, but I fail to see a logical motive.

Peter wrote:

We live in an increasingly nationalist Europe. Yes; “nationalist” is a dirty word, but that’s the reality. What is today called the “EU” was set up partly to prevent this and to eventually turn Europe into one uniform region, one country, but it has failed, and lots of politicians are re-examining old concessions and old relationships.

Below (as well as the quoted text) probably belongs in the politics section (though my motive is a-political)

I know you keep saying this, but Europeans don’t see it that way at all. In fact all data indicates there is more support these days for the European project than there ever was.
Despite their disappointment with current EU institutions, Europeans still believe in the importance of the European project. Majorities everywhere except for France and Germany still say that covid-19 shows the need for more European cooperation. In Germany and France, this is the most broadly held view by a significant margin (at 47 per cent and 45 per cent respectively). When asked whether their country’s membership of the EU is a good thing or bad thing, the most common answer in every country except France was that the EU is a good thing. In France, the most common answer was that the EU is neither a good nor bad thing. When taking other data points into account, in France, good and very good combined exceeded bad and very bad combined by 16 percentage points. When asked which actors respondents expected help from during the recovery from covid-19, the numbers placing their faith in the EU increased from when we asked the same question in April 2020.

The reality is (and this is not EU reporting) that the UK as it exists today is much more likely to fall apart than the EU in the coming years with English leadership being perceived less and less as representing the leadership of the Union. This piece in the Atlantic is a very good read on how the (dis)United Kingdom is perceived from within and from the US. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/01/will-britain-survive/621095/