The precious light sport rules limited stall speeds to 45 kts. Jumping to 59 kts for sport pilots adds a huge amount of aircraft to the allowable list for a sport pilot.
Indeed. My point was these new LSA landing speeds are essentially the same as the landing speeds for light singles flown by private pilots. No one is landing light singles at 80 knots.
I was picking random numbers to try and spell out that cruising speed isn’t a huge safety risk, but landing speed is. Notice that the slow speed (55 kts) I picked is legal under MOSAIC but the higher unsafe speed (80 kts) isn’t legal, and this illustrates that the FAA kept a fairly sane stall speed limit.
The fact that the stall speed limitation closely matches the existing limits for light singles shows where the FAA draws the safety lines. Although MOSAIC apparently allows twins, they keep the stall speed limitation at a sane number.
The only thing I don’t fully understand is them differentiating between 59 kts for a sport pilot, and 61 kts for a light sport aircraft. It feels a little arbitrary to draw those lines differently.
> The only thing I don’t fully understand is them differentiating between 59 kts for a sport pilot, and 61 kts for a light sport aircraft. It feels a little arbitrary to draw those lines differently.
The NPRM document explains it somewhere around page 200. It’s important to note that it’s 59 knots CAS clean vs 61 knots CAS dirty.
The argument seems to be that a sport pilot is operating with less training and less oversight and so if something goes wrong and they can’t get the aircraft fully configured for landing they’ll still be able to operate and touch down at 59 vs whatever the clean stall speed would be for an aircraft with a dirty stall speed of 61 knots. That margin could be fairly large (10 knots or more) and the difference in energy between 59 and 71 knots is massive.
