This year’s AeroExpo was particularly supportive of sustainability, with green balloons over “green” displays, a series of seminars on electric, hydrogen, and other clean skies aspirants, and flight demonstrations showing how far the industry and the Friedrichshafen exhibit have come. Alphafrog’s Illustrious Ancestor Alphafrog is a reintroduced and wildly updated ultralight from the 1970s, the Sirocco. Its high wing, pusher engine, and forward cockpit made for a comfortable way to cruise at leisurely speeds while avoiding the rigors of more open aviating. Even the original 1983 version, a wire-braced monoplane with three-axis control, had a polyester fiber-glass fuselage and fiber-glass leading edges on wings and tail surfaces. Spars were “bidirectional stratified” composite construction. (Burger-Burr’s Ultralight Aircraft of the World, 1983, a Foulis Aviation Book) The original, even with a partially-open cockpit, was capable of an around-the-world tour. As Alphafrog relates, “Forty years ago, on September 29, 1984, Patrice Franceschi embarked on the first circumnavigation of the world with an ultralight …
