Sunday, June 02, 2013
Homemade ultralight declared not airworthy; builder disputes decision, vows to fly: Cape Fear Regional Jetport/Howie Franklin Field Airport (KSUT), Oak Island, North Carolina
By Brian Freskos, Star News
Published: Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 7:46 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 11:27 p.m.
Norman Lewis almost reached the clouds. But he hit a snag.
Officials at the Cape Fear Regional Jetport recently laid out a series of criteria that Lewis must meet before embarking on long-planned flight to the Bahamas in his homemade, self-designed ultralight aircraft. For all practical purposes, that means Lewis is grounded, for now at least.
“They want me to tear my plane apart for no reason,” the 44-year-old fumed. “They want me to jump through hoops only so they can give the end-result answer they have up their sleeves.”
Lewis labored over his aircraft for a year and a half with the intent of making the several hundred miles-long flight to Grand Bahama Island. But the airport sees his endeavor as posing a serious safety risk, so much so that officials refuse to let him fly until Lewis proves he can make the journey, alive.
The airport’s safety adviser, a former Federal Aviation Administration crash investigator named Lyle Streeter, appeared before the governing board on Thursday to outline the steps that Lewis needed to take before lifting off. They included proving the aircraft meets federal specifications for ultralights, allowing an engineer to inspect its structural soundness, and completing flight lessons.
“It’s not a personal issue. We applaud him as an aviator,” said airport director Howie Franklin. “But people’s lives are at stake here.”
The dispute opens a window into the close-knit aviation world, where desires are sometimes at odds with goodwill, and liabilities impede ambition.
Under law, ultralight aircraft must seat only one person, weigh less than 254 pounds, and travel no faster than 55 knots (63 mph). No pilot’s license is required to fly one.
Lewis’ aircraft looks like a torpedo with wings, a shiny metal cap around the nose. It rides atop go-cart wheels, is about as long as two men lying down and runs on a gasoline generator engine modified for better horsepower. A homemadefuel gauge – a metal rod stuck into a piece of cork that floats on the gasoline in the 5-gallon tank – protrudes up in front the windshield.
Aviation has been Lewis’ lifelong interest. He flew with his father as a boy. And though he took flight lessons in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he never got his pilot’s license.
It took Lewis 18 months of nose-grinding work to complete the ultralight, sweating and smoking cigarettes in his garage on N.C. 133 in Southport.
When complete, Lewis stowed the plane in a hangar at the Cape Fear Regional Jetport about a month ago and began making final preparations to fly to Grand Bahama Island, with a stopover in Boca Raton, Fla.
A rift emerged after Franklin, the airport director, saw Lewis on a television news channel saying he planned to take off that weekend. Concerned about the aircraft’s fly-ability, Franklin asked Streeter, two workers from the maintenance shop and another ultralight specialist for their opinion.
The unanimous verdict: “It’s not airworthy,” Franklin said. “It is extremely questionable whether it can sustain any flight whatsoever.”
That decision does not sit well with Lewis, who said the airport is overreaching its authority by regulating ultralight flight, which does not fall under the FAA’s purview.
“I did some pretty good engineering on this thing,” he said, walking around the aircraft, which now is parked in front of his house. “Anybody who looked at my airplane and said it couldn’t fly is a fool.”
For Lewis, this is but a setback. The plan now is to find another runway.
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