Electric LSA

[designrs]

The students running to:
1) Less expensive training program flying electric (for multiple ratings)
2) Build hours cost effectively in addition to teaching (solo rental in electric less costly)
3) Get to Commercial / ATP
4) Fly Jets

* They still need multi which would likely be in a piston twin

[JimParker256]

The electric trainers really make me wonder. With the amount of time spent in training learning engine operation and how intertwined the engine management is with the operation of the aircraft, all I can think is that even though one learns to take off and land in the electric, there will be a large amount of hours of transition time to get proficient in flying an airplane with an engine.
How is this going to save money or time?

There's something to be said for "simplifying" the flight portion of training. Single-lever power control (whether electric power or FADEC-controlled gasoline power) just reduces the number of complex things a new pilot is having to deal with initially. Kind of like the way we learn in fixed-gear, fixed-pitch aircraft, instead of starting out with retractable, constant-speed, turbocharged airplanes...

I think learning much about engine management is well-suited to the classroom environment – far more than in flight, in fact. I took a weekend course called the "Advanced Pilot's Seminar" which was really "Engine Management 101". We had an hour or so in an engine test cell, demonstrating some of the stuff we were taught in the course, but other than that, it was 100% classroom training. We learned about the normal combustion process, leaning the engine, detonation, pre-ignition, and operating both rich-of-peak and lean-of-peak mixtures (when and how to do so, and when NOT to do so)... It was one of the best courses I've ever taken, and there was zero "in-flight" training involved.

If I had been a "rookie" pilot at the time, I'm sure a couple of hours of flight training, learning to apply the concepts learned during the course, would have been welcome. But on the flight back home from the course, I was far more comfortable (and confident) in operating the turbo-normalized IO-540 in the airplane I owned at the time. And the knowledge I gained in that course has carried over to several different airplanes I've owned since then – including the current Rotax-powered RANS S-6ES.