TEAM Airbike ultralight, 1800 mile plus trek to and from Buckeye Air Fair, Buckeye Arizona.
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TEAM Airbike ultralight / Experimental Aircraft
Most motorcyclists say 900 miles on a bike is a long trip. Seems reasonable.
How about when it’s an aerial motorcycle? …out in the breeze, smelling the air, feeling the hot or cool — hmmm, sounds interesting, doesn’t it?
Meet a man who recently made such a flight, over three days, and taking 17 hours of flight time to reach Copperstate 2020 with his legs out in the breeze (pretty true to the motorcycle metaphor, don’t you think?).
Mike Jefferson is the pilot and close contact with the air comes pretty easily to him.
TEAM Airbike Single Seat Ultralight Aircraft Images
He runs Big Air Hang Gliding giving flight instruction and helping people realize a two-person flight. Hang gliding flight instructors call that tandem. It doesn’t mean the same thing as tandem in a powered aircraft (one behind another). In hang gliding, two people must hang from a common point* so they are side-by-side or one atop the other or some variation; the method was called “tandem” and the term stuck.
Mike Jefferson — Hang Gliding Instructor — Taking someone with you in a hang glider demands some level of cooperation from the student. FAA permits two place hang glider for instructional purposes, and believe me, every one going for a flight is going to learn plenty. Still, an instructor needs to know his or her student and preflight coaching is essential.
To achieve a perfect safety record, Mike has clearly set some proper techniques to work for him. Check this figure — Over his years in business, Mike reports taking more than 5,000 tandem flights from hills around San Francisco. For comparison, imagine giving 5,000 Young Eagle flights. In that context, 5,000 becomes a very big number. You can do your own math on how long it takes to achieve that. Each of Mike’s tandem flights isn’t walking out on the airport ramp and hopping in a plane for an hour. Coaching, driving up to the launch site, setting up the glider, launching into flight, and retrieving from landing consumes much more than an hour even if the flight itself may be short.
Doing this thousands of times with excellent success speaks to using best practices. So, Mike comes to flying AirBike via a different path than most (though, ironically, your author also flew hang gliders extensively some years before flying AirBike). Mike got his powered aircraft training from Bobby Bailey, iconic designer of the Dragonfly tug that was specially created to tow hang gliders. Many are in regular airborne tractor duty around the USA and the world.
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