By Rick Larsen, EAA Lifetime 9006212
This piece originally ran in the April 2023 issue of EAA Sport Aviation magazine.
For me, the idea of fulfilling my dreams of personal flying has always had pragmatic roots. I need to see a clear path, to be able to envision myself being able to do it. I’ve always thought this way. When I was back in high school in Chicago in the early ’70s, I got into hang gliding because it was attainable, affordable, and doable. (For more on Rick’s early days in hang gliding, see “The First 20 Seconds,” Ultralight World, in the April 2020 issue. — Ed.)
Then college came and went, and I started my career on the business side of the airline world. It’s a story you hear all the time: Someone gets the bug as a kid, gets involved, and then life happens. Suddenly it seems like the idea of flying is out of reach. I was luckier than a lot of people, though. Between my industry immersion and my lifelong interest in RC modeling — a passion that’s still a big part of my life to this day — the aviation itch was scratched, even though I wasn’t getting myself up in the air all that much.
In the back of my mind, I always had this quiet question — if I did get back into flying, how would and could I go about it? For me, the answer was ultralights. I remember going out to the dunes to fly the hang glider one day as a kid. This guy shows up with an orange and white Eipper Formance foot-launched Quicksilver hang glider.
Unlike our flexible Rogallo wings with our 4-to-1 glide ratios, that first Quicksilver had what we’d recognize as a traditional rigid rectangular wing and a tail with a rudder and horizontal stabilizer. He just stepped off the dune and kept flying, and it was totally unfair. We were gliding, but he was soaring. That made a real impression on me, and permanently planted the name Quicksilver in my head.
It wasn’t much later that Eipper added an engine, some wheels, and a seat to that unusual hang glider and created the first Quicksilver ultralight. Even while I was getting my aviation fix from my day job and my RC hobby, I always stayed tuned to what was happening on the ultralight side as it was booming in the early and mid ’80s, then settling down into the ’90s.
Through that period, even with all of the other things in my life vying for attention, I kept saying to myself, “I could see being able to go do that.” It was always in the back of my mind, but it took me a long time to act on it.
I remember coming to Oshkosh in the ’90s with my daughter Erica, and we would spend a lot of time watching ultralights. When she was 6 or 7 years old, she got her first flight in a Flightstar, and that’s what initially gave her the bug and led to her successful career as an airline pilot.
I got to know Carla Larsh, EAA 245755, a longtime volunteer in the Ultralights area and later the chair of EAA’s Ultralight Council, pretty well in that period. We’d meet up every year, and every year I’d talk a little more seriously about taking the plunge and getting into ultralights. Carla connected me with another future EAA Ultralight Council member, Gene “Bever” Borne, EAA 155256, a Quicksilver dealer who now owns the company.
With those connections, I knew that buying, building, and flying an ultralight was something I could do, if I ever decided to. I could clearly and easily see the path from here to there. Then I’d go home after Oshkosh with all of these brochures and settle back into the business of daily life.
Then, in 1999, I came home from Oshkosh full of my usual enthusiasm, and my wife, Pat, looked at me and, “Why don’t you just go do it?” I was finally and thankfully out of excuses. But I didn’t just order a kit immediately. I had to get everything else in place first. I talked to Carla, who, along with her husband, operated Larsh Air Park in Colfax, Indiana, not too far from our home in Indianapolis. She assured me that I could have a hangar at their strip, and she also put me in contact with an instructor, John Seifert (1933-2022), based in Terre Haute. With a hangar and instruction all lined up, I called Bever and ordered a kit.
I bought a Quicksilver MX kit in the fall, moved the cars out of the garage, and set to work. My father-in-law came out and tinkered on it with me every time he came to visit. The project was pretty well finished by the following spring, and that’s when I started taking lessons with John in his two-seat Quicksilver. We were flying out of a little airport in Brazil, Indiana, just outside of Terre Haute, and it was the first formal flight instruction I’d ever had. I’ve heard so many times from so many people that flying RCs makes the transition to full-scale flying a lot easier. In my experience, they were right. (It’s a lot harder to go the other way, as it happens.)
One of the great things about that era was that, when it came time to solo, I was going to do it in my own Quicksilver. After I’d had about six or seven hours of dual, my father-in-law and I put it on a trailer and took it to Larsh Air Park. We reassembled it and did the first engine start. John met me there the next day and test flew it, and made sure it was trimmed well and rigged right. Then, an hour later, I hopped in it and made my first solo, which was only the second flight of my Quicksilver.
I’d never seen anything but ultralights operate at that little middle-of-nowhere farm field strip, but sure as the world, I took off and there was a 172 or something similar in the pattern. I decided to just get out of there for a while and flew a couple of miles north of the airport where I could see the traffic but not really have to deal with it. I messed around for 15 or 20 minutes, the other guy departed, and then I made my first landing. I think I did a total of four or five touch-and-goes on that flight.
That was pretty cool. It was just a straight Quicksilver MX with a single-surface wing, but it flew great. And it sure felt good to solo. Along my path, I’ve soloed three times — first the hang glider, then the Quicksilver, and then a Cub, which is what I fly now.
Like I said, when I took those first steps into ultralight flying, I was following a path that I’d scouted in advance, a path where I could clearly see the goal. At that point in my life, I didn’t have a good grasp of all the different options that were available, and I wouldn’t have thought about joining a flying club or just showing up at my local FBO to take lessons, and that’s fine. Ultralights were an extension of hang gliding, and so my flying happily followed the same path.
Flying the Quicksilver was simple, pure, and inspirational. There’s just something about cruising along low over a cornfield at 43 mph that’s just cleansing. In all the flying I did in the Quicksilver, I don’t think I ever got above 1,500 feet off the ground. I just didn’t. To me, that was and is the essence of flying. It’s one thing to read about ground effect in a book, but it’s totally different when you can feel it in the seat of your pants, settling into that cushion and throttling back to just motor gently down the runway at 3 or 4 feet off the ground.
All of my ultralight time, or almost all of it, was logged in the first two hours of the day or the last two. Of course, those were the smoothest times of day, but it was about taking advantage of those magic hours and watching the sun rise or set. It was like sitting on the porch, a few hundred feet in the air. That perspective is unique, and just so beautiful — and it’s something that very few people have the opportunity to see firsthand. Looking back at those logbook entries, I see times of 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, and that was it. You had 5 gallons of gas, and the starting point and the destination were almost always the same.
After several years, and something like 10,500 minutes of some of the most rewarding flying I’ve ever done, I had another itch to scratch, and that was to buy a Cub. I may be the only guy I know who bought a J-3 because he wanted to go a little faster. Plus, my daughter was showing a real interest in learning to fly, and I wanted something we could enjoy together. Unfortunately, hangar space is finite, so that meant I had to sell the Quicksilver. I know it changed hands a couple of times. Last I knew, a FedEx pilot had bought it, and it was doing just what it was supposed to do — reminding him of what the pure love of flying is all about. As for me, when I fly my Cub, I fly it a lot like I did my old Quicksilver. Lots of low and slow, plenty of short hops, and more sunrises and sunsets than I could count. It’s just fun.
Rick Larsen, EAA Lifetime 9006212, is EAA’s vice president of programs, chapters, education, museum, and AirVenture features and attractions. When he’s not at work or building and flying RC models, you can find him around sunset, shooting touch-and-goes in his 1939 Piper J-3.