When I was a kid, the woods behind our neighborhood were the land of treasure, and the apex of discovery was the junkyard. We didn’t go there to scavenge car parts so much as to conduct due diligence on a plan — never executed, God be praised — to assemble our own General Lee, a car that, in retrospect, none of us could have wired, welded, or legally driven. But the real object of our aspirational engineering wasn’t a car. It was an ultralight airplane.
If you were a kid in the early 1980s, you knew a guy who knew a guy who allegedly had an ultralight. It was the great democratic promise of American aviation: a lawnmower engine, a frame you could practically buy off a rack, wings sewn from what amounted to parachute silk, and suddenly you were airborne over the cul-de-sacs like some barnstorming uncle. It felt like the Jetsons had arrived early and only your neighbor Gary knew about it. (Typical Gary.)
And then — nothing. Forty-some years on, in an age when a fourteen-year-old can order a drone that livestreams in 4K and lands itself, nobody is strapping a saddle to one and buzzing the water tower. So what happened? Did the government quietly kill this? Is there a permit somewhere with our names on it, denied?
The answer, annoyingly, is both “not exactly” and “sort of, yes.”
The regulation that made the whole ultralight boom possible — and that, in its way, later throttled it — is FAA Part 103, adopted July 30, 1982 and effective that October, formally establishing recreational ultralight flight. Part 103 is a marvel of federal minimalism: a powered ultralight must weigh less than 254 pounds, carry no more than 5 gallons of fuel, fly no faster than 55 knots, and hold a single occupant — and people flying them needed no certificate or medical qualification at all.
No license. No test. No government functionary standing between you and the sky, so long as you were willing to trust your life to something with the structural integrity of a beach umbrella.
This, it turns out, is precisely the problem. Because Part 103 asked for zero credentialing, it also produced zero accountability, and the results arrived exactly as fast as physics demanded. Between March 15 and August 22 of 1983 alone, 31 people were killed flying ultralights, out of an estimated 30,000 aircraft in the air — a body count that would have gotten any other consumer product recalled by lunchtime. The year before, ultralight accidents had jumped from 141 to 243, with fatalities rising from 16 to 23. One FAA official attributed the carnage to pilots who were “light in experience and heavy in desire,” which is either the most damning safety assessment or the name of my next smooth jazz album.
Presumably the people who built and flew these planes were aware of the dangers inherent in strapping a motorcycle engine to a lawn chair and launching yourself a thousand feet into the air. But there was an obvious problem with a system that required no training: How exactly was anyone supposed to learn?
For years, the answer was a peculiar regulatory compromise. Part 103 ultralights could legally carry only one person, making conventional flight instruction rather difficult. So the FAA allowed aviation organizations to administer exemptions permitting two-seat ultralight trainers, with instructors operating under those programs rather than conventional FAA flight-instructor certification. A newcomer could go up with someone who knew what he was doing before attempting the traditional aviation instructional method known as “hop in and see how it goes.”
And for roughly two decades, the arrangement worked — or at least persisted. The exemption also stretched well beyond its original purpose, as two-place machines increasingly occupied a regulatory gray area between genuine ultralights and conventional airplanes.
Then, in 2004, the FAA rolled out its Sport Pilot and Light-Sport Aircraft rules, a broader overhaul of recreational aviation that also spelled the end of the two-seat ultralight-training system. The old exemptions were phased out. Qualifying two-seat training machines could no longer simply operate as “ultralights;” owners who wanted to keep flying them legally generally had to bring them into the certificated aircraft system, often as Experimental Light-Sport Aircraft, before a hard January 2008 deadline. And the pilots flying those aircraft now needed the appropriate pilot credentials.
Here’s the punchline, and it’s a very American one: The true, single-seat, sub-254-pound Part 103 ultralight is still completely legal today, and still requires no pilot’s license whatsoever.
Light-Sport Aircraft, meant to modernize the space, instead became a segment generally priced over $100,000 — a peculiar way to democratize the sky. As one longtime pilot on an EAA forum put it more bluntly than any regulator would: what actually killed the ultralight industry was the ending of the two-seat trainer exemption, since without affordable training the movement could never rebuild its base.
The FAA has also recently moved in the other direction. Its new MOSAIC rules, rolled out beginning in 2025 with additional Light-Sport Aircraft changes taking effect this year, substantially expand the range of aircraft available to sport pilots and loosen some of the old limitations. The government, in other words, is not currently engaged in a secret federal campaign to make sure Gary never flies again.
Still, the history of the ultralight illustrates a more subtle way a technology can disappear. You don’t necessarily have to ban the thing itself. Make the ecosystem around it more complicated and expensive — the training, the instruction, the aircraft that let beginners learn safely — and eventually there aren’t enough newcomers to replace the people who leave.
It’s the same way a state can technically permit something while making the permit office open one hour a week, on a Tuesday, during a solar eclipse.
The early 1980s were a magical time that promised freedom in the skies, even if it was primarily for adrenaline junkies with a death wish. It signaled that anything was possible in the future, from flying cars to personal jetpacks. To demonstrate the failed promise of the latter: There’s a band called We Were Promised Jetpacks, and their debut album came out seventeen years ago. It’s been a running joke for almost two decades.
Hobbyist flight captures something about the arc of postwar American futurism: an era that assumed technological momentum was a birthright, only to discover that inventions don’t exist independently of the culture, economics and regulations surrounding them.
In the case of ultralights, the government didn’t exactly kill the dream. The most radically deregulated version of it remains perfectly legal. But the path into that world became narrower, more expensive and harder to find.
Forty years later, that feels like a particularly American ending: not banned, just abandoned, sitting in a barn somewhere with the wings still on, waiting for someone who never came back for it.
This week at National Review, I wrote about a few recent examples that remind us all of a classic cycle: Government creates a problem that politicians then use even more government to try to remedy. As I wrote:
In the early 2000s, quasi-governmental entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac thought they were doing urban communities a favor by pushing people into homes they couldn’t afford, leading to a real estate bubble and its bursting in 2008. Other governmental zoning laws, such as minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, and permitting delays, constrain housing supply and drive up prices. Then governments respond with subsidized housing programs, rent control, or first-time buyer credits to address the affordability crisis those same rules helped create.
And, of course, the availability of federal student loans has inflated the cost of going to college, leading to a push for taxpayers to bail out the federal loan program under President Biden’s plan to “forgive” them.
And yet America’s elected officials continue to wander around this field of rakes, stepping on each one and learning nothing in the process. The incentive to appear as though they are “doing something” is stronger than the incentive to acknowledge the obvious and predictable result of the “something” they are trying to do.
Read the full thing here.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a remembrance of Dolly Parton, who had passed away at the age of 80 the previous day.
A sampling:
Even in death, Parton pulled off a magic trick no other public figure can manage anymore: getting the entire country to agree on something. Flags were ordered to half-staff. Musicians who agree on nothing else — country traditionalists, pop titans, actors who spend most award shows lecturing America about its failures — all found themselves saying the same thing, more or less, in the same breath. It wasn’t performative grief. It was recognition that something genuinely irreplaceable had left the room.
Fittingly, she stayed in character until the end. For months, Parton had waved off concerns about her health with the kind of self-mocking humor that made her impossible not to love, chalking up her ailments to kidney stones and joking that doctors were “digging more stones out of me a year than the rock quarry in Rockwood, Tennessee.” She wasn’t hiding a cancer diagnosis so much as she was simply being Dolly about it — deflecting sympathy with a punchline. Even her exit was on-brand: no self-pity, just one more joke on the way out the door.
For over half a century, Dolly Parton has been exactly what the world needed, and that is still the case. With her death, the world is a less vibrant, optimistic place. There may never be another American as American as Dolly Parton.
Watch her perform “Milwaukee, Here I Come” with Porter Wagoner:
I jointed my friend Will over at his podcast this week to discuss new albums by Westside Cowboy, Mike D, and Sweeping Promises. There is also more Dolly Parton talk.
You can listen/download here:
On the aforementioned podcast, I noted that I have immersed myself in Stereolab's past albums. It’s pretty stunning to look back in retrospect and see how influential they have on music for 30 years running.
Here’s a performance of their song Les Yper Sound (from their classic album Emperor Tomato Ketchup) from Later With Jools Holland in 1996:
THAT RIGHT THERE. I want my flying car.