Montblack wrote:
wrote)
A little birdie whispered in my ear that the weight limit for
FAR 103 will be raised to 330 lbs in about a year.


400 lb single seater would be better - which would include 'safety
equipment' weight. Floats would get extra lbs.

...and 10 gallons of fuel.
.....and no upper end speed limit.

If they're going to fix 103, let's fix it right.

The FAR 103 limits are set to minimize risk to bystanders
in an UL accident.

The limit on fuel, arbitrary though it may be is very
unlikely to be changed as increasing it obviously increases
the potential severity of a fire resulting from a crash.

The upper speed and weight limits, together, limit the
energy in a crash and of the two the speed limit is the
more important. However, though I haven't seen statistics
on it, UL accidents involving a collison at maximum
horizontal speed seem uncommon. The more typical
accident is a forced landing (near stall speed) due
to engine failure. Accidents resulting from structural
failure will typically result in the aircraft falling
from the sky at most at terminal velocity in free fall,
not a kamikazee type dive to impact. So even though
raising the speed limit would make ULS inherently more
risky to the public one would expect only a minimal
opportunity for that risk to be realized.

Of the FAR 103 restrictions the one I would most like to
see relaxed is the upper speed limit. That could give
ULs some limited practicality for cross country flight.
Consider the moni motorglider, barely over the FAR
103 weight limit but with a cruising speed up to 120 mph.

Now, the moni has its problems but it showed that a plane
within the weight limits of FAR 103 could have real cross
country speed.

Without an upper limit on speed, you could have UL pylon
races. What a blast! Actually, you could have a rule
limiting prop pitch since a rule limiting speed per se
would not be practical.

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FF