Fuel prices may be in a momentary decline, but the handwriting is clear: The cost of owning even a fixed-gear, four-place single is slipping away from more and more pilots. Light sport aircraft (LSAs) are heralded as a possible solution, but what happens when you need to go several hundred miles? Are these “hobby planes” up to the task?

The question isn’t whether you can travel in an LSA-people have taken ultralights around the world, so, of course, you can. The question is whether they have reached a level of utility close enough to a four-seat single that the tradeoffs are minimal and the gains are worth it.

In our view, this analysis comes down to four things: comfort, efficiency (for both fuel and time), payload and adverse-weather capacity. We asked owners and operators for their thoughts and then put our findings to the test. One January afternoon, we borrowed a new Remos GX from Tommy Lee of Adventure Flight in Springdale, Arkansas, and took off for a meeting in Houston, Texas, just shy of 400 miles away.

Loading Up

If all you need to pack is an overnight kit and your flight bag, any LSA will do. To

carry more than this however, you’ll want to look at where it can go. Some designs, such as Jabiru and Flight Design, have massive baggage areas and capacities. Others have little more than a hat shelf. On that note, be careful what you store behind your head as it becomes a projectile in a crash.

The Remos had a baggage area accessed by removing the pilots seat. Many LSAs have baggage areas that are hard to, or impossible to, access in flight. This is a change if youre used to tossing a bag on the back seat and grabbing it when needed.

Because all LSAs are limited to 1320 pounds on wheels, weight gets to be an issue with two people on board. At best, youve got about 625 pounds to play with for useful load. With only one person, however, the LSA can haul some serious gear.

Fuel and Flight Planning

The importance of fuel planning for LSA travel caught us off guard. The Rotax-powered Remos GX carries 21 gallons of useable fuel, toward the higher end for an LSA. The forecast for our Springdale-to-Houston leg was for about 10 knots on the tail. We planned a non-stop flight at 5000 feet that would burn about 14 gallons of gas, take three hours and leave over an hour reserve for the nighttime arrival in Houston.

As things would have it, the promised tailwind became an increasing headwind. We kicked up the power from the planned 4800 RPM (the Rotax is connected to the prop through a gear reduction) to the maximum continuous power of 5400 RPM and reworked fuel burn.

The results were a bit of a surprise. The rpm increase was 11 percent, but the fuel burn jumped from 4.6 GPH to 6.1 GPH-or 33 percent. A similar 11-percent increase in RPM on an O-320 or the like would have been about a 20-percent increase in fuel consumption.

The LSAs low speed and limited fuel capacity means monitoring your progress versus your plan is a serious item. The GPS helps immensely here with accurate groundspeeds and airport information at your fingertips. It also lets you explore options with the computer doing the math. We werent getting to Houston without a fuel stop and there werent many options over East Texas to get more gas (Mount Pleasant Regional (KOSA) is a nice airport if youre ever in this area). The limited fuel supply is also a concern if you need to divert for any reason.