Sport Flying Books

It's a fact: Learning how to fly has never been cheap. You have to hire an instructor and a training plane, take lessons, study for tests, pass those tests, buy or rent a plane, buy fuel and insurance, and find the time to get into the sky.

The new fact is: Flying is becoming cheaper than ever! On September 1, 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) made official some major rule changes that cut the costs of learning and flying by half or more. Literally millions of wannabe pilots now can safely learn to fly. That includes you!

This Flight Guide introduces the brand-new sport-pilot certificate and light-sport aircraft designation, and what both can mean to your dreams of someday learning how to fly. Maybe you've already heard about the changes, but don't know exactly what they are and how they affect you. This is the real deal. Here's how you can do it.

Flying Words

Sport flying refers to flying light-sport aircraft for recreation. Recent FAA rules offer the new sport-pilot certificate and define light-sport aircraft requirements toward making flying fun and safe.

It was just a century ago that brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright discovered powered flight. On the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December of 1903, the two bicycle repairmen were rewarded for hundreds of hours of planning, tinkering, and testing. The Wright Flyer flew for a distance shorter than the length of a modern airliner. But it flew!

Ten-plus decades later, aviation has dramatically changed how we work, play, and move about the country. Without airplanes, cross-country trips would be made in days rather than hours. Overnight packages would take a week to arrive. Frequent-flier miles would go unused.

Today, there are three types of flying: scheduled airlines, military, and everything else—called general aviation (GA). What might be surprising is how big GA is! In fact, 95 percent of the 220,000 civilian aircraft in the United States are general-aviation aircraft. And there are lots of airports: 13,000 at last count, with just 2 percent of them served by scheduled airlines.

And there are lots of pilots; the latest count is more than 640,000 in the United States. The experts say that the reason there aren't more pilots is the perception that flying is unnatural and dangerous. The cost of flying enters the equation, too, but it is the fear of flying that keeps many people grounded. So here are the facts:

• Flight is a proven science that follows constant rules; the pilots who get into trouble are those who break the rules.
• When you get good training and follow the rules, flying is much safer than many recreational sports we engage in.
• You can get a sport-pilot certificate in about a week of concentrated study and practice—or spread it out over a couple of months. (There's really no such thing as a sport or other pilot "license." It's actually a certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration or FAA.)
• The cost of earning your sport-pilot certificate is about the same as a nice vacation.
• Many sport pilot-qualified planes and the new light-sport aircraft cost about as much as a sport utility vehicle (SUV).

Flying Words

Sport pilots are allowed to fly airplanes that meet specified weight and performance limits. New planes that meet these new regulations are called light-sport aircraft (LSA). Some older certified airplanes also meet these limits. Together, I will refer to them throughout this website as "sport planes."