• mcp avatar

    By - visited on 31 March 2006

If you've got a pang for flying or being extremely top-down nosey, then there's no finer and cheaper activity than microlighting. These days it's far removed from flying by the seat of your pants in ice cold conditions. The model that we flew (Ikarus C42) resembles a regular small airplane and the lay person would struggle to tell any difference.

That said, take-off and landing can be a bit of a harrowing experience in windy conditions (as we had it) since the lightness of the plane and its size just gets thrown about by wind gusts and turbulence leading to a fear of just dropping out of the sky or a wing snapping off! We were assured that neiher of these are likely to happen as the microlight can glide back down to relative safety easily and they're tough as old boots.

After the first ten minutes, you get comfortable with the movements and feeling and start enjoying the amazing views and nimbleness of the small machine. The video below is a fair representation, but cannot put across the true bouncing about feeling. Give it a go, I'm sure you'll enjoy.