I'm working on my PPL at the moment, and I found some pretty fascinating facts about certifications. Apparently there's a very very sharp divide between anythin

I'm working on my PPL at the moment, and I found some pretty fascinating facts about certifications. Apparently there's a very very sharp divide between anything that can be constructed as "commercial" flight, aka somebody pays you to take them for a flight, and non-commercial, i.e. it's just you and maybe your friends. The former category has some pretty solid regulations like, for example, a continuous chain of service history. Once you decide a plane is no longer commercial, you can skip that, and it suddenly becomes less regulated than even your average car. There are rust buckets flying out there without any issue. There's a guy on tiktok that bought a literal $200 plane and is documenting his work on it - and he started test flying it almost immediately. I don't have enough experience in the field to tell myself if aviation tech is mature enough to be considered "rusty truck level", but we definitely have the data to know it.