the.com/ultralight
flying for people who looked at planes and decided they were embarrassingly heavy
means Extremely lightweight, especially describing a very small, minimal aircraft built for one or two people, or gear designed to weigh as little as possible.
from A modern compound of two old pieces: the Latin prefix "ultra-," meaning "beyond," and "light" in the sense of "not heavy," which traces back through Old English "leoht" to a Germanic root and a distant cousin in the Latin "levis" (light, the same family that gives us "levitate"). Stitched together, "ultralight" means "beyond light" — a 20th-century word that took off, quite literally, with the rise of tiny powered aircraft and later spread to backpacking and gear, where it became a near-religion of shaving grams.
- weight limit
- US legal ultralights cap at 254 pounds empty
- no license
- FAA requires no pilot certificate to fly one
- one seat
- single occupant only, by federal definition
- slow on purpose
- top speed legally capped near 63 mph
- migration aid
- used to teach whooping cranes their flight routes
gossamer albatross — human-powered aircraft that flew across the english channel in 1979
x-23 lightning bug — cia reconnaissance drone weighing 1 pound, deployed over china in the 1960s
world's lightest aircraft — guppy that weighed 10.7 kg, flown by donald stits in 1975