World Wide Web Woes

According to the ‘Latest News’ section of the British LAA website (Light Aircraft Association, successor to the former PFA) , LAA recommends to the UK CAA that all British registered Zodiac CH601-XL be grounded as well.
According to this report, the affected owners have been contacted directly by a letter dated November 4th, 2008.

Now, this letter is an interesting one, as it references CS-VLA regulations, the European ‘very light aircraft’ category. From a requirements point of view, this category is clearly more stringent than European ultralight/microlight regulations.
And now the worrisome part begins: the Zenair CH601-XL that crashed in The Netherlands was registered as a microlight (Dutch ‘MLA’ category). This begs the question what is being compared with what. Apparently, we now also have to consider certification standards, to which the crashed Zenair CH601-XL’s were certified….

EDIT: The Dutch grounded all CH601-XL’s, irrespective of the category they were licensed in. The Dutch AD mentions both the Dutch ultralight and experimental categories.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Experimental Aircraft, Homebuilt Aircraft, Experimental Aviation, Homebuilt Airplanes, Aviation, Flight Safety, Lessons Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.