| Up,
up, and away! Taking to the skies in ultralights
By
Jack Kintner
The
take-off run is almost unbelievably rough, like speeding
through a cornfield in a pickup with someone in the bed
winding up a chainsaw right behind your ear. Just when
your molars are about to bail out, though, it all gets
smooth and the noise dies off.
Sort of, at least, and you clear the wires ahead and
begin to zoom out over Mud Bay at the alarming altitude
of 300 feet, gulls scattering and drivers in the
odd convertible on the freeway looking up agape at
the contraption you’re
flying in.
Actually, “on” would be a better term. You
don’t get into an ultralight any more than you get
into a dirt bike or a Harley, just like you wear a paraglider,
and simply hang on to a hang glider.
This kind of aircraft reacts instantly just to slight
movements, and both people onboard feel every move the
other makes, but like riding on a big bike, you relax
fairly quickly as you sense the steady control of the
pilot. Might as well, you think, as your lips curl back
in the wind and the pilot looks back to see whether or
not you’re
enjoying the ride.
And how could you not enjoy riding in something that
basically gives you a bird’s perspective, up close and personal,
of the countryside? That’s the main attraction of
these very small ultralights, or “Trikes” in
this case, as in an overgrown recumbent tricycle welded
onto a hang glider wing with a Chevy Geo engine in the
back spinning a composite (plastic) prop not much bigger
than the average room fan.
The countryside always looks interesting, intriguing,
cleaner and neater than when crawling around like a bug
on its surface. Instead of litter, you see the bend and
sweep of rivers and freeways, the contours of harbors,
mountains behind smaller mountains that keep them hidden
from ground level, and so on. It’s a hoot.
Our owner and pilot is Mikhail Gavrikov, who’s got
the closely cropped hair of a man who spends a lot of time
inside helmets. He owns and operates Open Skies Aviation
out of the King George Airpark less than a mile from the
Highway 99-King George Highway intersection. Their runway
is a grown-over farm field and there’s still the
occasional cow that must be chased off before take-off.
Gavrikov’s flight school and aircraft sales operation
are about as minimalist as you can imagine. It’s
a bit like calling your little sister’s lemonade
stand a deli. But that’s a calculated way to bring
home the appeal of this lowest end (almost) of the aviation
spectrum: trikes are nice because they’re light,
fun, cheap, easy to fly and easy to store (just tow them
home).
The flight school’s office/hangar/ picnic shelter
and dry spot in the rain is a portable garage held down
with stakes and rocks. You get the feeling that the whole
operation could be outta here in minutes, but for the moment
he’s offering you a unique perspective and a doorway
into aviation at maybe 10 percent of the cost of flying
a certificated aircraft. It’s certainly the cheapest
way to fly which doesn’t require either a crew behind
you, like hot-air ballooning, or other kinds of assistance
like an airplane or a cliff to jump off or another airplane
to tow you aloft. All you need is about 500 feet of flat
open space without too many trees to climb over on the
way out.
And earplugs. Part of the attraction for me was just
the noise and bustle of getting airborne, because this
is flying for the sheer joy of just being aloft, being
up there instead of down here. It’s an appetite I’ve had ever
since I began learning to fly as a 15-year-old and that
has stayed with me through four decades and change since,
from the day I first soloed on my 16th birthday through
years of commercial flying carrying people, freight, mail
and sometimes just me. This kind of flying captures that
essence, and it has enough of a contraption-like “magnificent
men in their flying machines” feel to it to seem
slightly absurd, but it works, and wonderfully well.
An incident that explains the exhilaration of all this
happened on the day I met Gavrikov. He’d just helped
a group of friends celebrate a woman’s 80th birthday,
someone who was also a 20-year breast cancer survivor.
Twenty years ago, a breast cancer diagnosis in a woman
then turning 60 was dire, but this gritty little great
grandma beat it.
“You only live once,” she yelled as they scooted
off down the grass runway, her friends – all survivors,
too – cheering her departure and return.
Gavrikov came to the lower mainland from Moscow a couple
of years ago, and the Poisk Trikes he flies and sells
are built in the state-run vocational school where he
once taught. It’s a lot like the BCIT at the Vancouver
airport, or the Bellingham Technical college. He now imports
the aircraft and sets them up for roughly $15,000 or so
depending upon a lot of variables. Used trikes run about
half that.
There are differences between Canada, who requires all
pilots of powered aircraft to be licensed, and the U.S.
where a powered aircraft that weighs less than 254 pounds
and carries just one person is called an ultralight and
is not regulated at all, aside from not being allowed
to fly in certain places.
Beyond that limit, the U.S. calls the more elaborate
aircraft “light
sport aircraft,” or LSA’s, while in Canada
they’re called ultralights. Got it? And above roughly
1,200 pounds, the weight of your average Piper Cub, they
become certificated airplanes and can fly at night, with
more than one engine, down to Boeing Field in Seattle for
the ball game and so on.
One really cool thing is that all these aircraft can
be put on floats for the ultimate fun summer machine.
For safety, many have a ballistic parachute system that
when deployed will gently lower the steel cage that wraps
around the seats.
For more information, go to www.bctrikes.com. Gavrikov
can be reached at 604/339-1906. |
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