Category: Flying

One of my personal highlights at Oshkosh this year was a demo flight in the Icon A5.

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I’ve been something of a skeptic regarding Icon at its $400,000-ish price (but the company has been making a lot of changes recently, so perhaps it will be re-priced soon?). But there is no way to justify any airplane as a rational purchase. A $30,000 Honda Accord is a much better machine for transportation, and generally quicker (when you subtract out all of the required training time, currency time, hanging out with friends at the airport time, and waiting out the weather time) than a $1 million Cirrus. The Icon is not “more irrational” than the Cirrus. They’re both simply “irrational” and, if someone has the money and enjoys the toy, why not?

First, the summary: the A5 is actually a great airplane for the owner of a lake house who wants to use it like a Jetski and zip around for 20 minutes before returning to base. The airframe, designed by Rutan alum Jon Karkow (who received a posthumous shout-out from Burt Rutan at Oshkosh this year), seems to have met all of the design goals. There are no sponsons underneath the wingtips to catch in the water and thereby capsize the aircraft while taxiing (see Lake Amphibian!). The plane seems to be quite forgiving in terms of landing attitude. It would be difficult to dig in and flip as is straightforward to accomplish with a Cessna on floats. As discussed below, the avionics should be more advanced.

Why does anyone care about a two-seat amphib? It seems that those who are jaded regarding small planes on wheels still love the idea of a seaplane. I posted some photos from the Icon A5 demo flight on Facebook and watched the Likes pile up. A comparable post regarding the Cirrus SR20 would have elicited only yawns.

Considering how few two-seat amphibious seaplanes are out there, this is a surprisingly active corner of the airplane industry. In addition to Icon, there is the Searey, the ATOL (a wooden design from Finland whose executives were at Oshkosh talking about how it will soon be certified in Europe and will have more payload than the Icon (but can wood hold up as well as the solid block of carbon fiber and plastic that is the Icon?)), and the Brazilian Petrel, plus probably a few more purely experimental designs.

Life is a lot simpler if you can set up Icon’s special dock (my video):

(This is why the Alaskans love their Cessnas on floats; pull up to any boat dock.)

After we left the dock, some water came into the cabin through the air vents, presumably due to the 8-12″ waves (close to the limit of what is reasonable). This is a non-issue as the Icon is at least half watercraft. A bilge pump will move the water overboard.

It is easy to maintain directional control at low speeds thanks to water rudders. Unfortunately, the pilot needs to remember to extend these below 10 knots (via a panel switch) and then retract them or risk them being ripped off during a high-speed taxi. Given that the GPS knows the aircraft’s ground speed, why can’t this be automatic?

With two average sized American guys on board, staying under gross weight is possible only with one hour of fuel and some prayer. Despite being right at gross weight, on a hot day, and in rough water, the A5 had a reasonable take-off run and climb performance. Getting up on the step is much simpler than in a conventional plane on floats.

Cruising around in the pattern with the side windows removed, the experience is noisy, even with Bose noise-canceling headsets. This is definitely not going to be comfortable for a long trip. But, again, if the mission is “take a weekend guest up for a unique and fun experience,” fatigue from the noise is not an issue.

Landing is almost idiot-proof (though, despite being a legal seaplane CFI, I was happy to have the Icon factory CFI sitting in the right seat!).

What didn’t I love? The gear handle and gear lights are not in the primary instrument cluster. They are down and to the right. A pilot with tunnel vision won’t find these in his or her scan. Absent avionics smart enough to say “Your wheels are down and yet you aren’t headed for a runway in the GPS database. Remember not to land wheels-down in the water,” there is a risk of landing wheels-up on a runway or wheels-down in the water.

Is this a real-world risk? With only a handful of planes delivered to customers, we already have “Icon A5 Flips On Water Landing” (June 25, 2019):

Both pilot and passenger suffered minor injuries after their Icon A5 flipped on landing at Okanagan Lake, West Kelowna, British Columbia. Police reports and post-crash video suggest that the Icon’s gear was extended for the water landing, likely to be the cause of the flip-over.

Rumor has it that at least a couple of owners have landed gear up on runways (oftentimes not reported to the NTSB and not in the accident database).

The Garmin portable GPS that is mounted in the center of the panel is the opposite of smart. It shows runways and water. Apparently running the stock Garmin software for a plane on wheels, it shows a red warning every time the Icon A5 is properly configured for a normal wheels-up landing in the water (that’s an impact with terrain as far as the Garmin knows!).

Summary again: If I had a lake house, I would seriously consider buying one! It is a reasonable value and a great achievement in terms of airframe design. Evaluating the Icon A5 against a Cessna on floats is an apples to oranges comparison that doesn’t make sense. The Icon is its own thing and the airframe is a huge improvement over the competition.

Related:

• my Icon A5 review following AirVenture 2010
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/08/02/time-for-a-robot-assistant-up-in-the-dome-light-of-the-cockpit/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/10/04/icon-a5-pilot-review/

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During lunch at EAA AirVenture, I encouraged my companions to accompany me to a talk by the crew of Southwest 1380 regarding their emergency landing following an uncontained engine failure during a flight from New York to Dallas. “So what,” was one GA pilot’s response. “They ran a checklist.”

It is Labor Day, however. Maybe we can celebrate people who simply show up to work and do whatever it is they were trained to do in the sim.

Was the Southwest 1380 incident truly just like an engine failure in a sim, with the remaining working components of the airliner adding up to a much better aircraft than 99 percent of the planes parked at Oshkosh?

The question was answered by Tammie Jo Shults and Darren Ellisor, captain and first officer appearing side-by-side on stage (see “Captain Tammie is the anti-Sully”).

First officer Darren was the pilot flying when the incident began. He described the autopilot quitting and the airplane rolling to roughly 41 degrees left. He responded by grabbing the yoke and pulling back thrust levers to stop the asymmetric thrust. “I knew we had some kind of engine problem and that we had to start down.”

Captain Tammie said that she remembered the Air France 447 crash in which two pilots gave the plane opposite inputs. The roaring noise from the decompression prevented oral communication, but once she saw that Darren was on the controls, she used hand signals to show that she was taking her hands off. Both pilots described vibration severe enough to make it difficult to read instruments or checklists.

Tammie continued to display her anti-Sully personality by explaining that the only reason she took over the controls was that Southwest requires captains to land emergency aircraft. She credited Darren with being perfectly competent to fly the plane and also with identifying Philadelphia as the best destination. She took over after most of the descent was complete and that left her to fly and handle radio calls while he ran the checklists.

The pilots noted that tasks in the cockpit kept them too busy to contact the flight attendants and explain what was going to happen. “Our first contact with the flight attendants was at 8,000’ [after coming down from 32,500’].” That meant roughly 15 minutes in which folks in the back had no idea whether they were going to walk down stairs at an airport or land in a cornfield. (See “Southwest 1380: think about the flight attendants”)

In addition to highlighting the efforts of the cabin crew, Captain Tammie recognized two passengers for heroism. “These guys left their oxygen masks and families to try to try to pull Jennifer [Riordan] back into the plane,” she said. “They took the risk of being pulled out themselves in the event of additional structural failure, which they had no way of predicting.”

(The passengers were able to get Ms. Riordan back into the plane after the airliner had slowed down and turned base, but unfortunately she died from her injuries.)

Once the oxygen masks were on and the plane was slowed down, did it fly like the sim then? No. There was a lot of extra drag on the left side. Darren explained that the failed engine’s cowling had spread out “like a thrust reverse” and that fragments had damaged the leading edge of the wing. It was difficult to make right turns and he later said that he wasn’t sure if the plane could have held altitude on one engine, even at 200 knots.

Partly due to the circumstances and partly due to Air Traffic Control’s repeated requests for the same information after every frequency change (e.g., souls and fuel on board), the crew finished only 1 checklist (“severe damage”) out of 7 that Darren thought should have been run.

The landing was uneventful despite the fueled-for-Dallas plane being 10,000 lbs over max landing weight. In keeping with the U.S. love for security and bureaucracy, Tammie said “the first person to come onboard the aircraft was FBI.” (i.e., the first people to enter the landed plane were not EMTs to help Jennifer Riordan).

Asked by an audience member why they didn’t ignore ATC’s requests for information after the first answered one, Tammie explained that they were afraid being intercepted by fighters.

There was continued confusion after landing regarding which frequencies to use to talk to the fire and rescue personnel at the Philadelphia airport.

Sidenote: both pilots are huge fans of Boeing and consider the 737 MAX to be perfectly safe. “I’d put him on it any time,” said Darren regarding the young son who’d accompanied him to Oshkosh. Boeing desperately needs to hire these two!

Both pilots are back at Southwest. Darren has completed the upgrade to captain that had been scheduled for shortly after the 1380 incident. Captain Tammie went back to work 3.5 weeks after the engine failure “because I wanted a little slice of normal. Getting back and getting to fly again was great.” She hand flies to 18,000’ for proficiency.

Jeff Skiles, first officer of “Miracle on the Hudson” US Airways 1549, was in the audience, attending Oshkosh mostly for the same reasons as everyone else.

Related:

• Nerves of Steel (remember that publishers choose the title, not authors!) comes out in October. Darren Ellisor is mentioned even in the Amazon blurb on the book, so I don’t think this can be said to be an attempt to turn this into a single-pilot incident.

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Destination Moon at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is on through September 2, 2019. The exhibit is a great experience, made better by the retired engineers who serve as docents.

Feel better about your achievements at the entrance…

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Ignore the awesome permanent collection:

You will be reminded that the Lunar Roving Vehicle (Moon Buggy) was built by Boeing…

There is a lot of great explanation of the Saturn V engines, some of whose core features were carried over from the German V-2.

Some of the advanced technology that each person in Mission Control had on the desktop custom-made consoles…

(For younger readers: You turn the dial to make a phone call.)

The Museum of Flight is not infected by an Oshkosh-style blind patriotism and reminds visitors that JFK may have launched the Apollo project to distract Americans from the “disastrous failure” at the Bay of Pigs (Eisenhower made the same point).

The museum’s compliance with current political orthodoxy is incomplete. On the one hand, the folks who designed and built Apollo are described as “A Diverse Workforce” because they had “many backgrounds and educational levels”. But on the other hand, Margaret Hamilton is not credited with writing the code for the Apollo Guidance Computer. Consistent with histories written in the pre-woke age, the software was written by programmers who identified as men prior to her joining the project. She “verified and installed programs,” according to the museum, which makes sense from a historical timeline point of view if not from a social justice one.

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Want to be famous? Don’t be Russian. Here’s the first woman in space. Compare her fame to that of Sally Ride, an American who followed her into space 20 years later.

Want to be famous? Don’t be part of the sixth mission to land humans (some identifying as “men”?) on the moon:

How many of the above names were familiar to you?

Don’t like physics homework? There is an easier path to becoming a rocket scientist at NASA:

One of the most poignant and confusing parts of the museum is near the front entrance. A statue depicts Michael Anderson, mission specialist and then payload commander on two Shuttle flights. The plaque says “Dreams really do come true.” Yet Col. Anderson died on that second flight, of the shuttle Columbia. Surely that was not his or anyone else’s dream.

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My advice: Hop a flight to Seattle, stay at the new Hyatt Regency, chow down at Din Tai Fung (I picked out some food to order there and asked a Chinese-American friend to critique: “That’s like going to Pat’s or Geno’s and ordering a hot dog”), and spend a day (before Sept 2) at the Museum of Flight.

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One interesting panel at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) this year was regarding civilian supersonic aircraft (see the Supersonic Renaissance clip on YouTube).

As with most innovations in aviation, the big enabler is an innovation in engine technology. GE Aviation, currently celebrating its 100th anniversary, has a new engine that is mostly based on the latest subsonic civilian technology and three of these will drive a the Aerion AS2 plane forward at Mach 1.4 while burning roughly 2X the fuel per passenger-mile as a Gulfstream G650. The second enabler is cash and the Bass brothers are supposedly kicking in $4 billion.

So far so good if the goal is 4,200 nm over water (Gulfstream G650 range is closer to 7,000 nm).

What about going over land? After a five-year regulatory process, the U.S. effectively banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. The ban relates to speed, not to noise over the ground. An aircraft whose sonic boom was quieter than a Honda Accord driving by on the street would be banned, for example.

In a rare example of a NASA project that might have an effect on someone’s day-to-day life, NASA is currently hoping to test fly an X-59 “quiet supersonic” plane in 2021. This will supplement testing done in 2018 with a a modified F/A 18. The shape of the plane is designed to prevent shockwaves from different parts of the aircraft meeting and reinforcing each other. This may reduce the boom by 30 dBA and produce a sound like distant thunder.

NASA is currently planning do to 2-3 years of testing to gather civilian reaction and then turn numbers over to the FAA for the beginning of a regulatory process whose result will presumably be a decibel-time limit. If the regulatory process takes the same 5 years that it did from 1968-1973, that will be 7-8 years after 2021 before manufacturers such as Aerion can have any idea whether what they’re designing will be legal to operate from NY to LA (and thus ready for climate change activist Leonardo DiCaprio!). In other words, it will take longer than World War II and all of the innovation that happened in aviation during those 6 years!

(Two nights earlier, Burt Rutan had given a crusty old guy’s talk about how pathetic young Americans were with their anemic pace of innovation. The government, including today’s NASA was singled out as particularly sluggish and unambitious, thus leading to “some homebuilders in the Mojave Desert” running Americans’ only space flights with humans on board.)

One interesting thing is that an airplane can potentially fly at Mach 1.2 at 60,000′ without a sonic boom ever reaching the ground. The speed of sound is slower where the air is colder and apparently the wave will dissipate as it goes through warmer air (but what if Hillary Clinton and DiCaprio are at FL510 in a Gulfstream G650 just below? Will their Champagne glasses be rattled?)

Aerion is planning to be in service in 2026 and to meet all Stage 5 takeoff and landing noise restrictions. To keep the rabble from rioting, the company is claiming to be “carbon neutral”. Yes they will spend $4 billion (enough to plant 400 million trees?) and burn 2X the fuel of the biggest Gulfstream per seat-mile. But the fuel burned can be 100 percent biofuel (i.e., corn!).

More: watch the Supersonic Renaissance clip on YouTube.

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An aviation medical examiner recently contacted me regarding a college student interested in learning to fly, but who lacked the use of his legs. I responded with what I thought was the standard advice for this situation: train in a classic Ercoupe, which didn’t have any rudder pedals.

The August 2019 issue of Flying Magazine (print edition) carries what might be an interesting update. Grant Korgan, subject of the recent Netflix movie The Push (to the South Pole), recently earned a Private certificate in a Cirrus SR20 that he adapted for use with only his hands (i.e., the rudder and brakes had to be operated without feet/legs).

Sidenote: Despite having lost the use of his legs in a snowmobiling accident, Korgan was able to earn a Class 1 medical certificate (required to be captain of an airliner).

An inspiring story for those of us who fly older Cirruses and complain about the lack of A/C…

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From Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture 2019):

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For years, especially during night flights, I have been wondering “Why can’t a Robinson R44 have a ballistic parachute like in the Cirrus, stuck on top like the pod for the Apache.”

Now it has been done! Zefhir from an Italian aerospace parts manufacturer, Curti. And it is turbine-powered! (via an APU engine, as per usual for jet-powered aircraft of this weight)

Experimental for now. Certified one day?

(An Apache crew visited Oshkosh…

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