Difference now is that you have to have a licence and the microlight has to be "registered."
As aviators we look poorly on people who don't abide by the rules and as Brits, we never question the vailidity, requirement or onerous nature of the rules - we just accept whatever they are.
If we take away the fact that microlights are now in the licenced category and so legally he was in the wrong - what we don't know is if his "experienced" friend checked over the aircraft and also gave the deceased the same sort of training that any microlight pilot might have had 30 or so years ago....
Does the evidence of this case (i.e. someone's very unfortunate death) not suggest though that the current rules are there for a reason? I know we can sit here all day long and debate the CAA but that's not the point. Despite their inefficiencies, high prices, red tape, you do have to sit there and think for a moment hang on, despite all of this they surely wouldn't make the rules up for a laugh? There has to have been
something or some piece of evidence to trigger any rules that we now have in place, no matter how much you do or don't agree with them.
People say that the aircraft didn't crash because it wasn't registered. Indirectly of course the answer is 'no', the CAA producing a piece of paperwork and recording the ownership of the aircraft doesn't
make the aircraft immune from crashing. But I guess as with all these things it's part of a string of requirements which one way or another goes some way to proving that everything is being carried out legitimately.
Just like police pulling over drivers for their tax being out of date...the tax disc doesn't stop the car from crashing, but when the police pull them over they quite often discover that said driver doesn't have adequate insurance, or the MOT's expired, or they're banned from driving as well. I think that if someone isn't following one rule, then there is a suggestion that there might be a deeper down reason in the sense that they are trying to escape following other rules too (unless of course it was purely an accident that they forgot to send off a particular application form).