It’s only an RV-12—a little ELSA with 100 HP. A modern trainer. Years in the making, our early-gen 12 kit project is almost ready to fly and I’m already getting stomach cramps from the fear of ham-fisting the little bird around the local patch—free entertainment for the tower cab. Seriously, I’ve flown the little RV-12 enough to know that sitting up and flying right, I can sort of master it—and can’t land it like a Malibu or travel with it like a Cirrus, though it does have big-buck Garmin glass. Its handling and wing loading is arguably among the best of the LSA offerings because, well, it’s a Van’s RV. I know with slow hands and feet, the 750-pound-empty lightweight might be an easy prang into the weeds in the wind. It probably won’t work well carrying more than the 1.3 Vso approach speed of 53 knots. I’ll train hard to not break it. Meanwhile, with an eye on the FAA’s MOSAIC, insurance companies have been watching the wrecks and adding some LSA models to the higher-risk pool, especially ones with limited fleet size and supportability. Hate to say it, but the stats aren’t handsome.
When we dove into LSA safety in a field report a few years ago, we found the light sport segment definitely had a higher overall accident rate than that of legacy certified aircraft. The fatal accident rate, by our calculation, was also higher at 1.6/100,000 hours compared to 0.93 for all of GA. Our study sample comprised only about 2000 SLSA airplanes in the field since the mid-2000s, while legacy models date to the 1950s and total some 150,000 piston airplanes. Some data is slightly skewed because I’d bet there are plenty of LSA prangs that aren’t reported to the FAA or NTSB.
It’s all familiar by now—coming into the flare too fast, followed by a pilot-induced oscillation until the prop smacks the surface or the landing gear comes off or both. At the sleepy airfield, stuff it into a hangar and fix it—quietly—without anyone but the trusted airport bums knowing of it. Senior pilots coming out of heavy singles and twins might bring an LSA home when the insurance company cuts them off. But maybe they should have reconsidered. At least we couldn’t find many pilot incapacitations in LSA flying, so when considering an older demographic, older folks might not be more of a risk than younger ones in LSA models. Still, insurance pros know that ham-fisted flying aside, LSAs crash for most of the same reasons heavier legacy models do, including running out of gas, stalling and spinning, pilot spatial disorientation and of course from mechanical failures and crummy maintenance. None of it helps the hardened insurance climate.
For a report at sister pub KITPLANES, insurance pro Scott “Sky” Smith had some words to bank by. He listed the top 10 things that will have an impact on insurance. At the top of the list is how well-known the aircraft is, and insurance pros tell me that Van’s models are among the easiest to insure given the fleet size and supportability. The other is training. In the experimental kit airplane world, that could mean flying the first 50 hours before any insurer will quote a policy. If you’re building something, have a solid plan for transition training if you plan to fly Phase I flight testing.
For the little RV-12 with a population of around 900 total planes, both ELSA and factory-built SLSA, training is easy to find when you are willing to travel some. I plan to train and complete the Rotax engine course in Florida where it’s warm, but there are closer schools with RV-12s that continue to prove that the airplane, unlike other LSA models, can work well as a trainer. But transitioning to high-performance models, the RV-10 as one example, will take some effort, though it’s not impossible with the right networking. As the fleet size grows, so does the pool of qualified instructors. It can be a dilemma, so we’ll look at light sport and experimental flight training—and the FAA’s MOSAIC—in an upcoming Aviation Consumer field report.
