Light aircraft — what's on the general aviation ramp

Start with wing position and material. High wing with a strut is one world, low wing is another, and a smooth composite shell with no rivet lines is a third and much more recent one. After that it's tails and gear.

The training fleet

• Cessna 152 / 172 Skyhawk / 182 Skylane — high wing braced by a strut. The 172 is the most-produced aircraft in history, which is why it is the default answer to "what was that little plane". A 182 is the same shape with a bigger engine, a constant-speed prop and a deeper cowl.
• Piper PA-28 (Cherokee, Warrior, Archer, Arrow) — low wing. The early constant-chord "Hershey bar" wing versus the later tapered wing dates the airframe at a glance; an Arrow retracts its gear.
• Diamond DA20 / DA40 — composite, low wing, long and thin, T-tail, big bubble canopy. Many DA40s burn Jet-A through a diesel engine, and sound completely unlike an Avgas single.
• Piper Super Cub, Aviat Husky, CubCrafters — fabric, high wing, tailwheel. The bush and glider-towing end of the ramp.

Fast singles

• Cirrus SR20 / SR22 / SR22T — composite low wing, swept fin, a side-yoke instead of a control column, fixed gear despite the speed, and a whole-airframe parachute with its placards on the upper fuselage. The best-selling piston single for two decades. If you want the type in more depth, cirrus-training.com covers the airframe, the parachute system and the avionics generations.
• Mooney M20 — the forward-swept vertical fin is unmistakable and no other production type has it. Retractable, narrow and very efficient.
• Beechcraft Bonanza — the V-tail Model 35 is the single most recognisable silhouette in general aviation; the 33 and 36 are the same aircraft with a conventional tail.
• Lancair — kit-built composite, astonishingly fast for the power, and known for approach speeds that demand real currency. The Evolution is the turboprop member of the family.
• Van's RV-4 to RV-14 — the most-built kit family in the world. Low wing, bubble canopy, tailwheel or nosewheel depending on the model, and usually a paint scheme its builder chose personally.

Piston twins

Diamond DA42 Twin Star and DA62 are the modern ones: composite, diesel, T-tailed, with long thin wings and a fuel burn that made them the default new training and survey twin. The older fleet is Piper PA-44 Seminole, Beechcraft Baron 58 and Cessna 310/340 — aluminium, Avgas, and much louder.

Light sport, ultralight and microlight

• Pipistrel — Slovenian; the Virus SW and Sinus are the familiar ones, and the Velis Electro was the first electric aircraft to receive a full type certificate.
• Tecnam — P2008 and P2010 singles, plus the P2006T, a genuinely very light twin.
• Aerospool Dynamic WT9 — Slovak composite, slim, fast, and common across European clubs.
• JMB VL-3 — a retractable ultralight and one of the fastest things in the category.
• Icon A5 — amphibious, with folding wings and sponson "seawings". Impossible to mistake for anything else.
• BRM Aero Bristell, Blackshape, Shark Aero, Flight Design CT — the rest of the modern composite LSA field.

Read the category, not just the shape

Two identical-looking aircraft can sit in completely different regulatory boxes. Type-certified aircraft are built to an approved design; amateur-built experimentals carry a placard inside the cabin door saying so; light-sport and ultralight categories are defined by weight and speed limits that differ between countries — a 600 kg European ultralight and a US light-sport aircraft are often the same airframe with different paperwork. The FAA's MOSAIC rulemaking has changed the US boundaries, so check the current rule text rather than an older summary.