> you're probably only going to kill yourself if something goes wrong; and what can be more American than allowing that?
I don't think the reason for this deregulation is that the FAA doesn't care if you only kill yourself, but rather that the number of people interested in doing this is and was in practice incredibly small. Yes, anyone can go buy a paramotor for $10,000 and probably figure out how to operate it just well enough to be able to kill themselves, but in practice this is extremely rare.
You can be sure that if it somehow became wildly popular for people to buy these things and it was causing lots of problems, the regulations would change. The exact thing happened with the massive popularity of "drones," which were similarly deregulated because the usage of RC aircraft had also been limited to a small number of RC clubs around the country.
I don't think the reason for this deregulation is that the FAA doesn't care if you only kill yourself, but rather that the number of people interested in doing this is and was in practice incredibly small. Yes, anyone can go buy a paramotor for $10,000 and probably figure out how to operate it just well enough to be able to kill themselves, but in practice this is extremely rare.
You can be sure that if it somehow became wildly popular for people to buy these things and it was causing lots of problems, the regulations would change. The exact thing happened with the massive popularity of "drones," which were similarly deregulated because the usage of RC aircraft had also been limited to a small number of RC clubs around the country.