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Thread: Disabled Flying
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Old 4th Jun 2010, 07:16
  #13 (permalink)  
Genghis the Engineer
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Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: UK
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For purely recreational flying, you might find it worth looking in the direction of microlights - the microlight community in general, and the BMAA in particular (but also some other organisations particularly APT) have a lot of experience of modifying aeroplanes then teaching disabled pilots to fly.

Historically the Shadow, Snowbird and Balerit are best known for their disabled modification - mostly concentrating upon lower lim amputees or disabilities, although there are certainly mods existing for varous flexwings, for the Thruster: and that's just the ones I know about. The community is also well aware that there's no such thing as a standard disability and that you need to treat each pilot/aeroplane/disability combination as a one-off and deal accordingly.

If you're new to flying, you may well be nervous of microlights as not real aeroplanes or fully safe - put that out of your mind, they're just a bit smaller than the normal run of flying school machines, but no less safe or capable in most cases, and often potentialy much more fun.


If you get onto the BMAA for a chat, I'm not sure who it is at the moment but they should have a disabled rep who can help you out, but also talk to the Tech Office who should be able to come up with a list of existing disabled mods which may be adaptable to your particular needs, and they should also be able to tell you which flying schools / instructors have experience of training disabled pilots.

On the whole however, I really don't think you have any insurmountable problems - just get on with it, solve the few extra problems you have that the rest of us don't, and enjoy that whilst in the air - nobody knows anything about you but your aircraft type.

G
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