Thanks to new FAA regulations and light aircraft like the Flight Design CT, private plane ownership is taking off
By Jeff Wise
Photographs by Peter Dawson
A rising swell is rolling toward the California coast, the dark blue ranks bending as they angle into the headland at Point Dume. Inland, the declining sun sets the Santa Monica Mountains glowing in the afternoon haze. Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway is slowing to a crawl, but as for me,my needle’s happily pegged at 135miles per hour. I’m cruising in a Flight Design CT, one of the hottest new light sport aircraft on the market. It’s a plane, but it’s got the soul of a pony car, spirited and responsive and born to have fun.
A generation ago, it wasn’t so uncommon for a guy to do what I’m doing now: set off in a small plane for a few days’ aero-tour. But in the eighties, economic woes and a tidal wave of litigation all but killed off the U.S. small-airplane industry. Today there are fewer than 600,000 pilots, most of them well past middle age. That’s where the light sport aircraft, or LSA, comes in. In 2004, the aviation industry convinced the government that if pilot’s licenses were more accessible and small planes were cheaper and better, more people might be drawn to flying. Now you can become a pilot with just 20 hours of flight instruction, half the previous total.
Yes, there’s a catch. You can only fly planes that qualify as LSAs. Among other things, these aircraft can’t carry more than one passenger, must weigh less than 1,320 pounds on takeoff, and can’t cruise faster than 138 miles per hour. But those numbers aren’t much of a limitation. Thanks to advances in technology, modern LSAs can fly faster and farther than many larger light planes of 30 years ago.
Take the German-engineered Flight Design CT. Built in the Ukraine, the plane has been a favorite for years in Europe, where more than 600 are already flying. Under the LSA rules, the CT is also becoming a bestseller in the U.S. From a styling perspective, it’s like a Cessna reimagined by Disney: small, perky, and deceptively cute. In reality, this is more greyhound than fluffy puppy. Clean lines allow the CT to perform at the maximum of its allowed speed envelope. (In a dive, or with a tailwind, I often found myself exceeding 150 miles per hour.) And thanks to its composite construction, the CT weighs only 698 pounds, which means it can carry enough fuel to fly 1,000 miles. The real kicker: a base price of about $100,000. That’s like buying an Aston Martin for the price of a Kia.
There’s no place better to fly it than California, where reliably sunny skies prevail over one of the greatest concentrations of public-use airports in the country. In the span of an hour I was able to buzz over skiers on mountain slopes and then circle over surfers working the Pacific swell. One day I swooped in on Alturas, a ranching town hard on the Oregon border,where the overnight low was 11 degrees. Four hours’ flight time later, I was peeling down to my T-shirt in San Diego, 550 miles south.
California has 261 public airports where touring pilots can drop
in at will. Many are served by at least one on-site business, called a
fixed base operator, or FBO, which provides gas, bathrooms, coffee,
telephones, and perhaps a computer terminal,where you can check the
weather. Many will even loan you a car so you c...
The CT’s virtues as a touring machine are quickly apparent. That bubble-shaped cockpit with its oversize windows provides plentiful space and impressive visibility; there’s even a window directly overhead so you can see where you’re going while turning in a steep bank. For a plane its size, the CT is surprisingly sturdy and handles turbulence well. All the same, I appreciate safety features like a four-point harness and the BRS 1350HS parachute system,which can safely deliver the entire aircraft to the ground.
Sprinting over the landscape in a small plane is completely different than experiencing the world from the seat of a car. It’s not just the sense of scale, the way you can take in a hundred miles of mountains and valleys in a glance, or the profound solitude and freedom. When you travel by road, no matter how remote, you’re still confined to the man-made world. High above the vast earth in a plane, you see how scant the marks of humanity really are.
The last leg of my trip takes me up the western side of the Sierra Nevada and then over Donner Pass. As the green and undulating land rises quickly toward me, I pull back on the stick to climb past 9,000 feet, then 10,000. Ahead, the bare, rocky peaks seem like an impenetrable wall, and I think of all the pilots who have died flying into canyons too narrow for flying out. Then the valley I’m following turns around a massif, and the Lake Tahoe basin opens up before me.
I’ve been to Tahoe before, but now it seems as if I’m discovering an unknown place. I can’t tell if it’s the relief or the thin air or just a trick of perspective, but Tahoe no longer looks like the ostentatious tourist attraction that I remember. It’s something simpler: a huge pond, blue against the azure sky, shielded in a bowl of rocky green hills. Not for the first time, I’m seeing a familiar place in an unexpected way—the way, it seems, it really is.
A rising swell is rolling toward the California coast, the dark blue ranks bending as they angle into the headland at Point Dume. Inland, the declining sun sets the Santa Monica Mountains glowing in the afternoon haze. Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway is slowing to a crawl, but as for me,my needle’s happily pegged at 135miles per hour. I’m cruising in a Flight Design CT, one of the hottest new light sport aircraft on the market. It’s a plane, but it’s got the soul of a pony car, spirited and responsive and born to have fun.
Yes, there’s a catch. You can only fly planes that qualify as LSAs. Among other things, these aircraft can’t carry more than one passenger, must weigh less than 1,320 pounds on takeoff, and can’t cruise faster than 138 miles per hour. But those numbers aren’t much of a limitation. Thanks to advances in technology, modern LSAs can fly faster and farther than many larger light planes of 30 years ago. 
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