Fri, Jan 02, 2015
A Flight Such As This Certainly Qualifies As An AeroSport, But Is It Legal?
The videos of Erik Roner relaxing in his balloon-lofted lawn lounge (BLLL) have gone viral, and you can’t deny the fact it looks like a lot of fun. However, this stunt has been tried before and in some cases the FAA has not found it sporty or funny.
At the risk of being a buzz kill, according to FAA regulations, it is not okay for anyone to fly in anything anywhere at any time. It’s important to remember that the regulations are there for a reason, and that reason is safety. Of course, anyone who wants to perform some sort of stunt takes their own responsibility for not injuring themselves, and that’s okay, but the FAA regulations are here to protect others.
The first obvious question is; is it legal to go aloft in any kind of contraption without being a certificated pilot? The answer is; yes…provided the vehicle qualifies as an ultralight under FAR 103. Based on what we’ve seen of Roner’s BLLL, it looks like there’s a fighting chance that it probably did qualify as an ultralight. It looked to us like it weighed less than 254 pounds and it’s obvious it was only carrying one person.
Anytime someone launches anything into the air they are entering the national airspace system. We hear a lot about this nowadays in discussions regarding unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and the same discussions could be held about how the airspace rules apply to a BLLL. This sort of flight can be performed in the airspace system legally. We don’t know enough about Roner’s flight to know whether or not he was in the appropriate airspace, but it looked pretty open to us.
An interesting side note is the shotgun Roner used for altitude control. Decommissioned war airplanes that are being flown by civilians are not allowed to be armed. Since the lawn lounge was never classified as a warplane, we figure he’s probably okay on that issue too.
All-in-all, Roner’s flight sure proved that where there’s a will, there’s a way.
(Image clipped from YouTube video)
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