TechSpot

A Google search for the term “industry self-regulation” quickly turns up over 87,000 hits, with much of it being bad news: from papers on how self-regulation fails to keep dangerous internet advertising from children, to articles on salmonella in peanut butter. In a culture of instant news and visual media, whole companies and even the livelihood of entire towns (e.g. Peanut City, Georgia or Toy Paint City, China) wax and wane based on two things: industry sustainability, and the media. Today most of the general public hasn’t heard about LSA or Sport Pilot, despite the fact that our own spouses suffer from information overload on the topic. And while the goal is to revitalize and provide new cost-effective entryways to aviation, the idea is to do it without having LSA show up on the 11 o’clock news.

In recent years, there has been substantial confusion in the light aircraft and ultralight industry regarding propeller inertia.

At the first organizational meeting for LSA standards writing in 2002 at Oshkosh, Adam and Marcie Morrison sat among the sea of faces, all interested parties looking to see how this great experiment would begin. Dan Schultz and others from ASTM presented information on the nature of standards, standards writing, and industry self-regulation.