Sport Pilot Talk

Just over a week ago, EAA hosted a webinar titled “Fast Track to Experimental”. Normally, you have to be an EAA member to view, but this one was presented by my friend, and moderator here, Professor Paul Shuch, who owns a flight school in Lock Haven, PA, specializing in Light Sport. He is allowed to post his own webinars on his website, and here is the link to this one if you’re interested...

https://avsport.org/webinars/videos/elsa.mp4

It goes into the regulations and paperwork involved in converting an SLSA to ELSA, and covers the potential benefits and drawbacks and legalities in doing so.

It was of special interest to me, since the professor had asked to use the 2009 conversion of my Sky Arrow to ELSA as a “case study”, which I readily agreed to.

Anyway, if you own an SLSA or hope to one day, and have considered converting it to Experimental, this webinar might be of interest. Enjoy!

Thanks for posting my link, Eddie. For me, the best part about teaching is that I'm always learning. In preparing and presenting each of the roughly four dozen EAA webinars I've done, I've learned something new.

This time, that something new came up during the Q and A following my presentation. A viewer asked about IFR operation of an ELSA (a subject that we've kicked around on these forums). Since time was limited and there were other questions in queue, my answer was brief.

Afterward, DAR Mike Huffman (who did Eddie's Experimental conversion, and who I referenced in my presentation) called me up to shed more light on that question. Turns out he was on ASTM Committed F37, and privy to their discussions on the subject. I told him that the question could provide enough material for a separate webinar. And he agreed.

The result is, I've just finished authoring a PowerPoint presentation titled IFR in an LSA. It's in the queue for live presentation in the EAA Webinar series, and scheduled for next July 14th. In early June or so, you should be able to register at eaa.org/webinars (you don't have to be an EAA member to watch live).

There will be a case study in this webinar too. Just not Eddie's plane.

For those of you who wish to view any of my past webinars, they're all linked from avsport.org/webinars (and they're all free).

This looks nice! I've been considering buying an SLSA and converting it to ELSA but the legal process has always been daunting to me. I'll watch this and maybe it will clear things up for me.

Also I just looked at your webinars web page and those look really interesting. How many can I download for viewing later offline? I only ask because I don't want to use through your website's bandwidth cap if you have one.

fatsportpilot wrote: I don't want to use through your website's bandwidth cap if you have one.

Don't worry about the bandwidth. I'm using a rather robust commercial server (hosted through Justhost.com).

fatsportpilot wrote:This looks nice! I've been considering buying an SLSA and converting it to ELSA but the legal process has always been daunting to me. I'll watch this and maybe it will clear things up for me.

There's nothing "daunting" about the process as long as you find the right DAR. I know of one out your way if you ever need his services.