I have been traveled to Nepal with my friends for 10 days last Oct. I plan to write up a series about this trip later. But, I can’t wait to share with you one of the most unforgettable experience we had – Ultralight Aircraft/Flight.
The original theme of our trip is trekking around Himalaya’s Annapurna Range. Ultralight flight is just the dessert. However, what ends up, it’s a must-have activity when I travel Nepal again. Don’t know what an ultralight flight is? Take a look 
Cool, right? Ultralight flight adventure is operated by Avia Club Nepal at Pokhara airport. The company offers three routes of ultralight adventure:
Fly for fun - Just a 15-minute flight, fly over Pokhara city and Phewa lake. As its name suggests, it’s just for fun. Not recommended as the flight duration is too short. You will probably regret to take this route.
Touch the fish tail - My friends and I took this route. This route doubles the flight duration to 30 minutes. The pilot tries to take you as close as to the Fish Tail. Of course, the flight route covers Pokhara city and Phewa lake. But don’t be fooled by its name. You still can’t touch the fish tail
Mountain Range Sky Trek – The extreme route with 1-hour flight duration and the flight takes you to fly over the whole Annapurna range. This route costs USD$198 (excluding airport tax). But if money is not an issue, I suggest you to take this one. From my experience, 30-minutes flight is still not enough and it’s still too far away from the mountains.
A few tips you may feel helpful when putting this adventure in your trip plan:
1. Book your flight early
Try to make your reservation as early as possible, so it don’t impact your trip plan. The flights are quite fully-booked during peak season, especially for the morning session.
2. Make sure they have enough aircrafts and pilots
The company only owns three fleets but they are probably not in operation on the same day. For our trip, one aircraft was under maintenance. And on that day, even there were two ultralight flights ready for operation, there was only one pilot on duty to serve us. What’s the problem with this? We had a group of five for this adventure. Think about if we all took the 1-hour flight. It will take all of us a total of 5 hours to complete this adventure. So, call them early and reserve your pilot & flight.
3. Bargain, bargain, bargain
Each aircraft is equipped with a digital camera on its wing. The first two photos I showed you above were taken by this camera. From time to time on your flight, the pilot asks you to smile and takes shots for you (5 to 6 shots for our 30min flight). Of course, these photos are not included in your flight package. The company sells the photo to you at USD$10 each (the offered price at Oct 2006), without soft copy. That’s really expensive. However, even for such price, you will probably end up buying one or two, as you can’t take those shots using your own camera. Before you make this decision, try to bargain with them. For us, we only want soft copies of the photos and do our printouts. Okay, we bargain for that. They finally offered us a CD with all shots (around 30 photos) at a price of USD$40!
Don’t get me wrong about the tips. I enjoy the flight adventure with Avia Club Nepal. Its staffs are friendly and the pilot is cool too!
Still not convinced? Or you are scared by such mini aircraft, querying about its safety? My experience told me the flight was very stable. So stable that makes me think it’s better than those from Boeing or Airbus. I highly recommend you put in this activity into your travel plan when you travel to Nepal, specifically, its remarkable city, Porhara.
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