Flying Lawn Chair

I was sitting in my apartment watching football this evening when I heard the buzz of a 2 stroke engine. It sounded like it was in the air so I went outside to look and saw a powered parachute. After doing about 10 minutes of online research, I guess it’s one of the flying machines in the ultralight class.
This thing flew close to my apartment, but not over it so I couldn’t get a very good photo, but having it just out of reach made me want to chase it down so I could get a closeup view…. and that’s what I did. My guess was that the pilot had taken off from the Wrentham State School fields, and I was right. Shortly after I got there, I was greeted by a security guard who asked if I knew who owned the minivan with the trailer on it. I said I didn’t know, though I assumed it belonged to whoever was flying the ultralight. He seemed suspicious that I was there with my camera, but he came back about ten minutes later and said he called the police chief who told him that the guy flying the ultralight had permission to use the field. After that, the security guard, Mike, was very friendly.
When the pilot was coming in for a landing I got a few photos and then went over to talk to him with Mike. I spent the next hour there just listening to stories.
As the pilot starts telling us all about his ride, which he said is commonly referred to as a flying lawn chair, I picked up an accent that I thought was German. Later on, he told us that he learned to fly at age 15 in Germany as part of military training during World War II. That was in 1943. The deal in Germany was that you decided which branch of the military you wanted to go into and you started your training in that discipline as a teenager. Part of the training for those who wanted to fly was building planes to learn all the mechanics, but they weren’t allowed to fly those planes, because…. well, would you want to fly a plane built by a bunch of teenagers who had no plane building experience?
It turns out this powered parachute thing is an expensive hobby. The whole thing is about a $15,000 investment, and I was told that the parachute should be replaced with every 300 hours of flying time… and that’s a $5,000 piece of equipment itself. Yikes!
This guy said he also built himself a small helicopter in 1980 that he never flew. It was apparently something that was about the same size as what he was flying tonight. But he said he built it based on how much he weighed then, and after quitting smoking he gained weight that he has never been able to take off and the ballast required to make the thing fly level would be too much for it to handle.
I could bore you with some more numbers that I heard all about in that conversation, but I won’t. So just enjoy the couple of photos I’ve posted here instead.