by Thomas P. Turner

Listen in on just about any hangar-flying session and the FAA’s rules and regulations will likely take a beating. Yet, for all our acrimony about them, the FARs really allow enormous freedoms for personal flight. In as little as 20 hours and the new Sport Pilot certificate, we can venture aloft in simple airplanes—to paraphrase instructor/author Bill Kershner, those that can just barely kill you—even carrying a passenger. Twenty more hours’ minimum experience gives us credentials for flying just about anything, just about anywhere; a simple instructor endorsement (with no minimum time requirement) says we can do so in a complex, high-performance and/or tailwheel airplane. We can…