The microlight fantastic - part I
The security men at the entrance to Seeb International Airport in Muscat, Oman wouldn’t let me – or my blind co-pilot Miles Hilton-Barber – in because we didn’t have flight tickets. The fact that we didn’t need tickets, because our own aeroplane was stowed safely in one of their maintenance hangars, cut no ice. A different shift of staff had come on duty since we’d made ourselves famous by arriving in a tiny microlight from Dubai the night before. And in these days of post-9/11 airport security, they had their instructions: ‘No entry without ticket.’
This became a recurring theme for virtually the whole of our flight by microlight from London to Sydney in the spring of last year. By Muscat, we were quite used to it and had developed various strategies to reach our aircraft in big airports. However, it was always time-consuming.
Primarily, you need to look like crew. I’m not really one for wearing a shirt and tie, but I wore one for the entire trip, along with my four captain’s stripes on my shoulders. (Yes, as the captain of a microlight, I’m entitled to wear captain’s stripes just as much as the captain of a Boeing 747.) Miles wore three co-pilot’s stripes. You also have to wear black shoes and trousers and a light-coloured shirt. In our case, it was pale blue, which was the colour of our sponsor, the charity Seeing Is Believing. Ideally, we could have also done with great big photo-ID cards around our necks saying ‘CREW’ in large type. But I only became involved in this particular adventure with 24 hours’ notice, so there was no time to prepare them.
The only giveaway was our huge bag – not the sort of thing that crew usually carry. It started life as a paraglider duffel and is extremely lightweight and folds up to nearly nothing. This bag contained our flying suits, helmets, headphones, pannier bags, life jackets, radio, GPS receiver and all manner of other stuff that could otherwise be pilfered from our tiny aircraft when we weren’t around.
With everything inside, the tote was unbelievably heavy, so Miles carried his pannier bag separately. This seemed to be mostly full of electronic kit and their chargers. Weight is everything in a microlight, especially on long trips where you’re carrying a few spares, tools, a life raft, life jackets and so on. I made Miles throw out non-essential stuff, but his chargers, plugs and adapters were a constant problem. Why don’t they make chargers universal?
As an experiment, I carried a personal digital assistant with an integral phone. I was able to recharge it in the microlight as we flew. I also packed a compact iGo Bluetooth keyboard for typing emails. The web browser is incompatible with some hotel wireless networks, but otherwise it worked well. We only carried one change of clothes each and relied on the laundry services of the hotels we stayed in to keep us looking respectable.
Motorbike of the sky
These days, microlights come in all shapes and sizes, from carbon-and-Kevlar ‘hot ships’ (which will easily outperform your average light aircraft for half the price) to foot-launched powered hang-gliders and paramotors (which are the simplest and cheapest way to fly without needing a mountain to jump off).
My preferred machine is something in the middle, known as a weightshift trike. I like trikes because they’re simple, with few moving parts to go wrong, making them extremely safe and stable. You can also pack them in crates and send them on expeditions fairly easily. Of course, they’re also lots of fun to fly – a sort of ‘motorbike of the sky’.
Trikes originated when pilots began putting engines on hang-gliders. But even by 1985, when I flew one from London to Cape Town, there was little similarity between the two. You certainly couldn’t have flown the wing like a hang-glider off the top of a hill as it was much too heavy and fast.
Since then, there have been two big developments. First, expensive Rotax 912 four-stroke engines became available during the mid-1990s. They are so much more reliable and economical than the original two-strokes that you hardly ever see a new two-stroke microlight today.
The second big (and more recent) development is in speed. For years, it seemed that trikes had a maximum top speed of around 130km/h. Everyone knew that if you made the wing smaller you could go faster, but nobody could make these tiny wings go reasonably slowly for takeoff and landing. The breakthrough came with the appearance of the P&M Quik. This machine took the triking world by storm in 2003 by being up to 40km/h faster than anything else while still behaving sensibly at low speed.
The GT450 is the latest development of the Quik. It’s slightly slower than the original but has a greater payload. The one Miles and I used achieved an average speed of 115km/h at an ‘economical cruise’ during the 21,400-kilometre flight from London to Sydney. It was almost completely factory-standard, apart from the addition of a longer-range fuel tank and a transponder, which is needed in order to land at big airports.
Suits you
We also used fairly ordinary flying kit. Our suits were standard ones from Ozee. Some people thought they might be a bit too warm for our Australia trip. However, in early March, we encountered unusually low temperatures all the way from the UK to the Persian Gulf – it dropped to –16°C crossing the mountains of Lebanon at 3,950 metres. Over Damascus, we got plastered in a couple of millimetres of ice. It only warmed up when it started to snow close to Amman, the capital of Jordan. By the time we landed in Muscat, I was wishing heartily that I had brought my Gerbing electric inner suit, which is great for flying in the UK during the winter.
We were quite comfortable for the most part, although we were shivering after two or three hours above 3,600 metres in the afternoons while trying to keep above the turbulence over India and Australia. We were drenched flying through some torrential monsoon rain over Malaysia, but anything short of a dry suit would have struggled to cope: it was nearer to a waterfall than mere rain.
For flying in more extreme conditions, you need specialist kit. It took a couple of years of testing to get everything right before I went to Nepal in May 2004 to tow Angelo d’Arrigo, the late Italian hang-glider pilot, over Mount Everest.
My machine was a strange hybrid of a P&M Quantum trike (the predecessor of the Quik), fitted with an enormously powerful and rather expensive turbocharged Rotax 914 engine, and hung from an XL wing, which is a 20-year-old-design. It’s very slow and safe, and perfect for towing at high altitudes. The whole machine is really good for only two things: going up and coming down safely.
In the event that I came across some Everest-sized turbulence that was sufficiently violent to break something, I had an Alpha ballistic parachute fitted to the microlight. This is a rocket-launched device capable of being deployed at a low altitude and bringing the whole machine down safely. However, I’ve seen a few load tests of microlight wings and you have to do extraordinary things to them before they’ll break. In normal circumstances, I usually don’t bother with a parachute.
Blowing hot and cold
When I was preparing my microlight for Everest, I spoke to Czech pilot Jan Bem, who had flown over the 8,000-metre peak Annapurna in a similar machine. Because it’s a few degrees warmer for the same altitude in Nepal than in Europe, he had had serious inlet manifold temperature problems – which neither he nor I had seen any sign of on test flights – so he recommended that I fit an intercooler. Towing a glider is, obviously, harder work for the engine than just flying alone, and this useful bit of advice saved our expedition from disaster. I still had some temperature-related problems, but these were fixed by making a radiator scoop from some fence wire, Velcro and neoprene.
Part of our testing was done in Fiat’s environmental wind tunnel in Italy. By dimming the lights of Turin for a couple of days, the temperature can be lowered to –43°C. You get in, and they turn on the fan. Both Angelo and I had been given fantastic mountaineering down suits from The North Face, which proved effective while sitting for an hour in a 100km/h wind at such a low temperature. Equally valuable was a borrowed pair of Scarpa plastic boots, which had already been to the summit of Everest on the feet of filmmaker Matt Dickinson.
The biggest problems were with the gloves and the helmet. I discovered that I would quickly get localised frostnip if there were any ‘leaks’ around my visor. Creating a seal was difficult with the added complication of the oxygen mask. My mittens, although warm enough, went very stiff in extreme cold, which meant that I had to remove them to do anything, with the attendant risk of losing them overboard.
We solved the helmet problem by making a rather elaborate neoprene skirt. This was stuck onto the helmet using glue and Velcro and tucked inside my suit. For my hands, I took a bit of a risk and used a pair of rather thin inner gloves on top of some electrically heated gloves, together with a pair of Ozee bar mitts – mittens that are attached to a bar on the machine. There was a risk of frostbite if the electric gloves failed, but this was offset by being able to use my hands to fiddle with things while in flight.
En route to Australia, the most common question I was asked was ‘How do you go to the loo?’ The simple answer is: you can’t. The trick is simply to not drink anything in the morning. Initially, Miles didn’t heed this advice, but during the flight from Corfu to Athens, he spent the last hour in some considerable discomfort. Thereafter, neither of us had a problem.
Learning to fly a microlight
A pilot’s licence is required to fly most kinds of microlights. Once you have that, it can be as expensive or as cheap as you like to own and fly your own aircraft. The best way to start is to join the British Microlight Aircraft Association (01869 338 888, www.bmaa.org).
A top-of-the-range hot ship can cost upwards of £60,000, so you will probably want to keep it in a hangar on an airfield. On the other hand, you can buy a perfectly airworthy 10–15-year-old two-seater for £3,000 and keep it in your garage at home. Annual MOTs are required, so if the paperwork says it’s airworthy, then it probably is.
You can still win a world championship in a machine that costs less than £5,000, although it might take a few years of practice to get that good.
From Apollo to Australia
Every expeditioner worth his or her salt will take as much stuff with them as they can for making running repairs to their vital equipment.
On my microlight expeditions, one of the staple items is duct tape. The trouble is that it, and almost every other adhesive tape, begins to lose its stickiness as the temperature drops. There is a simple solution: the ordinary kind of brown or clear parcel tape, and the slightly more expensive type that peels away from the roll without making that ripping sound. The adhesive for this tape was developed by NASA to hold the Apollo Lunar Lander together, and it remains sticky to –60°C.
Richard Meredith-Hardy is one of the world’s most accomplished microlight and paramotor pilots and holds the world microlight speed record.
Visit www.flymicro.com to find out more.
To learn about the other essential gear that Richard uses on his expeditions, and which component of his microlight came from a fighter jet, see The microlight fantastic - part II
February 2008
This became a recurring theme for virtually the whole of our flight by microlight from London to Sydney in the spring of last year. By Muscat, we were quite used to it and had developed various strategies to reach our aircraft in big airports. However, it was always time-consuming.
Primarily, you need to look like crew. I’m not really one for wearing a shirt and tie, but I wore one for the entire trip, along with my four captain’s stripes on my shoulders. (Yes, as the captain of a microlight, I’m entitled to wear captain’s stripes just as much as the captain of a Boeing 747.) Miles wore three co-pilot’s stripes. You also have to wear black shoes and trousers and a light-coloured shirt. In our case, it was pale blue, which was the colour of our sponsor, the charity Seeing Is Believing. Ideally, we could have also done with great big photo-ID cards around our necks saying ‘CREW’ in large type. But I only became involved in this particular adventure with 24 hours’ notice, so there was no time to prepare them.
The only giveaway was our huge bag – not the sort of thing that crew usually carry. It started life as a paraglider duffel and is extremely lightweight and folds up to nearly nothing. This bag contained our flying suits, helmets, headphones, pannier bags, life jackets, radio, GPS receiver and all manner of other stuff that could otherwise be pilfered from our tiny aircraft when we weren’t around.
With everything inside, the tote was unbelievably heavy, so Miles carried his pannier bag separately. This seemed to be mostly full of electronic kit and their chargers. Weight is everything in a microlight, especially on long trips where you’re carrying a few spares, tools, a life raft, life jackets and so on. I made Miles throw out non-essential stuff, but his chargers, plugs and adapters were a constant problem. Why don’t they make chargers universal?
As an experiment, I carried a personal digital assistant with an integral phone. I was able to recharge it in the microlight as we flew. I also packed a compact iGo Bluetooth keyboard for typing emails. The web browser is incompatible with some hotel wireless networks, but otherwise it worked well. We only carried one change of clothes each and relied on the laundry services of the hotels we stayed in to keep us looking respectable.
Motorbike of the sky
These days, microlights come in all shapes and sizes, from carbon-and-Kevlar ‘hot ships’ (which will easily outperform your average light aircraft for half the price) to foot-launched powered hang-gliders and paramotors (which are the simplest and cheapest way to fly without needing a mountain to jump off).
My preferred machine is something in the middle, known as a weightshift trike. I like trikes because they’re simple, with few moving parts to go wrong, making them extremely safe and stable. You can also pack them in crates and send them on expeditions fairly easily. Of course, they’re also lots of fun to fly – a sort of ‘motorbike of the sky’.
Trikes originated when pilots began putting engines on hang-gliders. But even by 1985, when I flew one from London to Cape Town, there was little similarity between the two. You certainly couldn’t have flown the wing like a hang-glider off the top of a hill as it was much too heavy and fast.
Since then, there have been two big developments. First, expensive Rotax 912 four-stroke engines became available during the mid-1990s. They are so much more reliable and economical than the original two-strokes that you hardly ever see a new two-stroke microlight today.
The second big (and more recent) development is in speed. For years, it seemed that trikes had a maximum top speed of around 130km/h. Everyone knew that if you made the wing smaller you could go faster, but nobody could make these tiny wings go reasonably slowly for takeoff and landing. The breakthrough came with the appearance of the P&M Quik. This machine took the triking world by storm in 2003 by being up to 40km/h faster than anything else while still behaving sensibly at low speed.
The GT450 is the latest development of the Quik. It’s slightly slower than the original but has a greater payload. The one Miles and I used achieved an average speed of 115km/h at an ‘economical cruise’ during the 21,400-kilometre flight from London to Sydney. It was almost completely factory-standard, apart from the addition of a longer-range fuel tank and a transponder, which is needed in order to land at big airports.
Suits you
We also used fairly ordinary flying kit. Our suits were standard ones from Ozee. Some people thought they might be a bit too warm for our Australia trip. However, in early March, we encountered unusually low temperatures all the way from the UK to the Persian Gulf – it dropped to –16°C crossing the mountains of Lebanon at 3,950 metres. Over Damascus, we got plastered in a couple of millimetres of ice. It only warmed up when it started to snow close to Amman, the capital of Jordan. By the time we landed in Muscat, I was wishing heartily that I had brought my Gerbing electric inner suit, which is great for flying in the UK during the winter.
We were quite comfortable for the most part, although we were shivering after two or three hours above 3,600 metres in the afternoons while trying to keep above the turbulence over India and Australia. We were drenched flying through some torrential monsoon rain over Malaysia, but anything short of a dry suit would have struggled to cope: it was nearer to a waterfall than mere rain.
For flying in more extreme conditions, you need specialist kit. It took a couple of years of testing to get everything right before I went to Nepal in May 2004 to tow Angelo d’Arrigo, the late Italian hang-glider pilot, over Mount Everest.
My machine was a strange hybrid of a P&M Quantum trike (the predecessor of the Quik), fitted with an enormously powerful and rather expensive turbocharged Rotax 914 engine, and hung from an XL wing, which is a 20-year-old-design. It’s very slow and safe, and perfect for towing at high altitudes. The whole machine is really good for only two things: going up and coming down safely.
In the event that I came across some Everest-sized turbulence that was sufficiently violent to break something, I had an Alpha ballistic parachute fitted to the microlight. This is a rocket-launched device capable of being deployed at a low altitude and bringing the whole machine down safely. However, I’ve seen a few load tests of microlight wings and you have to do extraordinary things to them before they’ll break. In normal circumstances, I usually don’t bother with a parachute.
Blowing hot and cold
When I was preparing my microlight for Everest, I spoke to Czech pilot Jan Bem, who had flown over the 8,000-metre peak Annapurna in a similar machine. Because it’s a few degrees warmer for the same altitude in Nepal than in Europe, he had had serious inlet manifold temperature problems – which neither he nor I had seen any sign of on test flights – so he recommended that I fit an intercooler. Towing a glider is, obviously, harder work for the engine than just flying alone, and this useful bit of advice saved our expedition from disaster. I still had some temperature-related problems, but these were fixed by making a radiator scoop from some fence wire, Velcro and neoprene.
Part of our testing was done in Fiat’s environmental wind tunnel in Italy. By dimming the lights of Turin for a couple of days, the temperature can be lowered to –43°C. You get in, and they turn on the fan. Both Angelo and I had been given fantastic mountaineering down suits from The North Face, which proved effective while sitting for an hour in a 100km/h wind at such a low temperature. Equally valuable was a borrowed pair of Scarpa plastic boots, which had already been to the summit of Everest on the feet of filmmaker Matt Dickinson.
The biggest problems were with the gloves and the helmet. I discovered that I would quickly get localised frostnip if there were any ‘leaks’ around my visor. Creating a seal was difficult with the added complication of the oxygen mask. My mittens, although warm enough, went very stiff in extreme cold, which meant that I had to remove them to do anything, with the attendant risk of losing them overboard.
We solved the helmet problem by making a rather elaborate neoprene skirt. This was stuck onto the helmet using glue and Velcro and tucked inside my suit. For my hands, I took a bit of a risk and used a pair of rather thin inner gloves on top of some electrically heated gloves, together with a pair of Ozee bar mitts – mittens that are attached to a bar on the machine. There was a risk of frostbite if the electric gloves failed, but this was offset by being able to use my hands to fiddle with things while in flight.
En route to Australia, the most common question I was asked was ‘How do you go to the loo?’ The simple answer is: you can’t. The trick is simply to not drink anything in the morning. Initially, Miles didn’t heed this advice, but during the flight from Corfu to Athens, he spent the last hour in some considerable discomfort. Thereafter, neither of us had a problem.
Learning to fly a microlight
A pilot’s licence is required to fly most kinds of microlights. Once you have that, it can be as expensive or as cheap as you like to own and fly your own aircraft. The best way to start is to join the British Microlight Aircraft Association (01869 338 888, www.bmaa.org).
A top-of-the-range hot ship can cost upwards of £60,000, so you will probably want to keep it in a hangar on an airfield. On the other hand, you can buy a perfectly airworthy 10–15-year-old two-seater for £3,000 and keep it in your garage at home. Annual MOTs are required, so if the paperwork says it’s airworthy, then it probably is.
You can still win a world championship in a machine that costs less than £5,000, although it might take a few years of practice to get that good.
From Apollo to Australia
Every expeditioner worth his or her salt will take as much stuff with them as they can for making running repairs to their vital equipment.
On my microlight expeditions, one of the staple items is duct tape. The trouble is that it, and almost every other adhesive tape, begins to lose its stickiness as the temperature drops. There is a simple solution: the ordinary kind of brown or clear parcel tape, and the slightly more expensive type that peels away from the roll without making that ripping sound. The adhesive for this tape was developed by NASA to hold the Apollo Lunar Lander together, and it remains sticky to –60°C.
Richard Meredith-Hardy is one of the world’s most accomplished microlight and paramotor pilots and holds the world microlight speed record.
Visit www.flymicro.com to find out more.
To learn about the other essential gear that Richard uses on his expeditions, and which component of his microlight came from a fighter jet, see The microlight fantastic - part II
February 2008
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