An Army buddy of mine had just bought an ultra-light (a plank), and I met him at the local field in North Caroling outside of Bragg where we were stationed (as special forces), and he offered to let me take her up for a spin.
As it was a full camber airfoil, after a quick pre-flight, I deemed it airworthy and jumped in and turned on the fan. Power to weight ratio was excellent, and this was to prove useful. I climbed out easily to pattern altitude and began a left circuit. Thing was so light that it took me a minute to get used to controlling it in the wind, but basically got heading downwind no problem. It was a little weird flying with only an airspeed indicator, though. I had asked my friend before departing the deck what the stall speed was, and was a bit puzzled by his response of, "I don't know", but was not detered.
Well, I began my descent, downwind abeam, and shortly turned base. The throttle was controlled by a level on the side-rail, and was a bit odd to me as well, but all was well till I entered my turn to final, and made the classic, and usually fatal (maybe that's why they call it final!), mistake of student pilots, however in a unique and at least inovative way.
I reached up to tweek the power back ever so slightly while in a nice steep (1st mistake) turn to final, and tap the throttle ever so slightly. Unfortunately, I had not noticed that the whole assembly was rather loose, and my little tap was not resisted and rather effectively cut my power.
Needless to say, I stalled low and slow, and from the ground appeared to disapear behind a barn at the end of the runway. Needless to say, I slammed the throttle full forward, and was only saved due to the afforementioned power to weight ratio, and the lack of a 2nd story on the barn.
I poped up over the barn, more carefully removed power, and did a nice smooth full stop and as cooly as possible exited the aircraft and informed my friend that it handle pretty good but that I think he needed to tighten the nut on the throttle linkage.
As if this wasn't enough, later my friend kept asking me numerous questions that it seemed any pilot would know, and I finally asked him, "You did go to ground school didn't you?" He replied that know, he did not have any flight training! I about died, knowing that he had calmly jumped into his new single seat ultra-light and flown without a second thought.
When asked about his foolish descision, he told me that really he had just intended on running fast down the runway to test it out, but that it had become airborne and so he had little choice but to learn to fly.
Patrick
