~)ICON A5 aims to revolutionize flying: We test it (~
#1
05-28-2016, 03:18 PM
~)ICON A5 aims to revolutionize flying: We test it (~
ICON A5 aims to revolutionize flying: We test it
Does any MCF Member Fly ? If so ? What do you fly ? I would love to have the below plane. I want to get a license...It's on my list. What do you think of the below ? Post & let us know...>>>>Thanks
Does any MCF Member Fly ? If so ? What do you fly ? I would love to have the below plane. I want to get a license...It's on my list. What do you think of the below ? Post & let us know...>>>>Thanks
MAY 27, 2016
1 OF 28The ICON A5 is a two-seater amphibious plane that requires only a sport license to fly, which takes just 20 hours in the air to obtain. We flew the A5 and found it light and responsive. It's easy to fly and offers up tons of adventure possibilities. Price is a little steep: between about $200,000 and $250,000 or so.
OFF YOU'LL GO, INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER … AND WITH ONLY 20 HOURS OF AIRBORNE INSTRUCTION!
Now (just about) any idiot can fly a plane with very little instruction. Are we all doomed? Or are we all going to have a blast?
The new ICON A5 is not just a new airplane, though it is a really cool amphibious, trailerable, carbon fiber two-seater that just about any dope can pilot (witness, in a moment, us at the stick). It is, in addition to that, an entirely new way of looking at flying. In the old days, becoming a pilot involved many long hours of ground school where you learned takeoff weights of four-engine jets, bylaws of aerial livestock transportation and crop-dusting protocol in Botswana. There was a lot of stuff in there that you had to know even if all you wanted to do was go for a spin in your open-cockpit puddle-jumper out in the middle of nowhere. That was followed by equally long hours of supervised flying with a certified, glowering instructor who would whack your knuckles with an FAA-certified aluminum ruler if you screwed up. It was understandable since the Federal government, as well as most people down on the ground, didn’t want just any idiot up there dropping out of the skies onto their houses. It was a safety thing. But it might have been too much of a safety thing.
“What we suffer from today with aviation is over-regulation,” said ICON Aircraft founder and CEO Kirk Hawkins. “By all rights this should be a sport ... (but) the government got involved and they regulated it from the framework of, ‘Airplanes are dangerous, difficult transportation devices that really should be kept away from the public.’ Over the years, the regulations increased, not decreased, to the point where it almost shut out the consumer from flying.”
So 12 years ago, the United States Ultralight Association petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change those rules. Specifically, they wanted to make it easier for people who flew powered hang gliders, gyrocopters and all the other fun little aircraft their members flew. Why should you have to learn how to land a C-130 on an aircraft carrier if all you’re going to do is piddle around on your property in your ultralight? That is a wild paraphrase of what the Ultralight Association actually said to the FAA, but nonetheless …
“The FAA, under their mandate, must actually take a look at these things,” said Hawkins.
And the FAA agreed with the USUA. There’s more to it than that, of course, but the upshot is that the FAA created two things: the light sport aircraft category for cool little planes and the sport pilot license for those who want to fly them. You still have to learn a lot about flying, but it is a faster and simpler licensing process than the old pilot's license. Where and when you can fly is restricted, too -- daytime only and nowhere near JFK, for instance -- but you can still get up in the air over a surprisingly vast swath of the world.
“Let’s get them a little safe plane, a simple plane that the average consumer can learn to fly and a license that they can get into without learning things you won’t need to learn,” said Hawkins. “And that’s how you start.”
And with that as a basis, Hawkins, who flew F-16s in the Air Force and 767s for American Airlines, founded ICON.
The ICON A5 is amphibious, you can take off from land or water. When you're done, fold up the wings and trailer it back to your garage.The first versions of the A5 looked much like the production versions you see here. But the big differences were in the details -- specifically, the aerodynamic details that keep the ICON A5 from spinning out of control in the event of a stall. At full stall, with the stick pulled all the way back, the plane still flies and is still controllable. If you’re a pilot, you might not believe that is possible, but we were up in an A5, stick pulled way back, and, while the plane was certainly a lot slower, it was still completely controllable and still flyable. It didn’t stall, it didn’t spin.
ICON cited the statistic that 41 percent of fatal crashes of small planes occur as a result of a stall that leads to a spin from which the pilot doesn’t recover. So, halfway or more through the development of the A5, engineers set a goal to make the plane very safe in that regard. The work took an extra year and a half and five different wing configurations but the result is a pair of wings that will keep even the most talentless boob in the air. How do they do it?
“It’s not like a recipe where you can say, ‘Add these three things and you’ll have it,” said designer Klaus Tritschler. “Everything about the plane reflects spin resistance.”
Among the things in “everything” is a wing cuff that separates the air flow of the inboard wing from the airflow of the outboard wing, so that if the inboard portion of the wing is stalled then the outboard portion is still providing lift. Or something like that -- we’re not aeronautical engineers. And there are many other factors. But we’re here to tell you that it all works.
“This is kind of like traction control so you can focus on the joy of flying,” said Tritschler.
The cockpit layout is pretty simple, there's not a lot to confuse you.Which is what we -- talentless, unlicensed we -- got to do next. Since the A5 is amphibious, meaning it can land on water as well as land, we were shuttled out to the middle of Lake Berryessa in Northern California near the Napa Valley to have a flight. There were three A5s beached on an island in the lake and we were invited into one of them for our first flight. Yes, there was a licensed, trained instructor in the right seat but we strapped into the left, where the first officer sits in your 737. A light sport aircraft cannot have a pressurized cabin and can’t generally fly over 10,000 feet, so for our flight they took out the side windows.
The A5 is all carbon fiber, which helps cut down critical weight. ICON had to appeal to the FAA to raise the 1,000-pound weight limit of light sport aircraft up to 1,430 pounds for this particular amphibious plane. The “maximum weight useful” is listed at 1,510 pounds with the “load” 430 to 550 pounds, depending on options.
The cockpit is relatively stark. There’s a switch for flaps (zero, 15 or 30 degrees), a big throttle, a stick, rudder pedals and a Spartan set of gauges. First thing you do is pump the water out of the bilge (mostly water from your flip flops when you stepped in). From there it’s simple: Start the 100-hp Rotax 912 flat four engine. Make sure the flaps are extended. Then take off.
At about 45 mph, you ease back on the stick, the A5 lifts from the water and voila, you’re flying.
One of the first things our instructor did once we got about 400 or 500 feet above the lake was pull way back on the stick. In any other plane that would initiate a stall, which would lead to a spin as the plane spiraled down. But that didn’t happen here.
“See?” he said. “The plane is still fully controllable and fully flyable.”
We floated around like that for a while just to show it really could be done. There is a big, huge parachute called a “Complete Airframe Parachute” just in case everything goes south, but everything is not going to go south, not with the A5’s “Spin-Resistant Airframe.”
The wings can be folded up by one person by hand. That makes it easy to transport and easy to store.Then we took control. We had flown here and there over the years, from a glider to small Cessnas to a Ford Tri-Motor (we even crashed a hang glider once) so we had a vague idea of what we were doing. It was easy. Not as easy as a car on cruise control, or as laying on your couch, but easy for something that is actually moving through the air off the ground.
You really have to pay attention when you’re flying, since any misalignment is multiplied the longer it remains misaligned. So keep the plane trimmed, watch the horizon. Or watch the handy “Angle of Attack” (AOA) gauge, which keeps you from stalling, something you can’t do anyway.
Small airplanes are susceptible to updrafts, cross winds and air hiccups, and we felt a lot of those during our two flights that day. But the plane was a piece of cake to control as long as you paid attention. We even landed and took off from the lake a couple times, with us at the controls. The landing was much smoother than a runway landing, since water is softer than concrete. But we did land on a runway once – though the instructor handled that one. Be sure you have the gear down for runway landings and be sure it’s up for water. There’s a little lever to raise and lower the landing gear. ICON lists takeoff/landing distance at 500-1000 feet at sea level. It was longer than the Ford Tri Motor, for sure, but shorter than your average DC-10. We had a blast.
And so, ICON hopes, will you. ICON sees a $10 billion-plus global market opportunity, part of what it lists as a $30 billion “powersports” market and a $645 billion “outdoor recreational market.” Why buy a Ferrari when you can buy an airplane for the same price? Base model A5s start at $207,000. Ours was $257,000 fully loaded. Training for new pilots lists at $9,500 and takes from 14 to 16 days, including all the reading you have to do on the ground. You’ll do a minimum of 20 hours flying with an instructor on the very same Lake Berryessa that we flew on. It’s 15 miles long, that lake, plenty of room.
So buy one of these and stow it under the fantail of your megayacht. Impress the Larry Ellisons of the water world. Or get the custom trailer, fold the wings and park it in your garage. Or keep it in the hangar at your local airport. The possibilities are endless. As are the places you can go. Oh, the places you’ll go!
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