I'm generally biased in favor of anything that flies, but truth be told there have been a few light-sport aircraft that I haven't enjoyed flying. I felt that those airplanes were so light on the controls that it was rather unsettling. While the Icon A5 looks cool, I was prepared for the worst when I went to fly the two-seat amphibian. Boy, was I in for a surprise.
To my eye, the A5 is one of the sexiest light airplanes to have hit the market in ages. Icon has also done a terrific job of promoting its hot commodity through exciting videos and a relentless social media campaign that has produced more than 1.2 million likes on Facebook. While I subscribe to the notion that airplanes must look good to fly well, as Marcel Dassault famously said, I wasn't so sure about the Icon. I was questioning, for instance, whether the engineers had to compromise flying qualities to meet their spin-resistant design goals.
Another reason I was questioning the flying characteristics of the A5 is that it took the Icon team several years to get from the announcement that it would develop an amphibious LSA to the day when the first production model had a Light Sport Aircraft airworthiness certificate displayed inside the cockpit.
That day happened just a few days before I headed to Napa Valley, California, as one of a select few journalists to have been invited to fly the A5 out of Lake Berryessa in the scenic rolling hills just east of the valley famed for its exquisite wines.
On the eve of our arrival, Icon founder and CEO Kirk Hawkins gave us a full briefing on the history and design of the airplane. The A5 is a two-seat light-sport amphibian constructed mostly of carbon fiber materials pushed through the skies by a 100 hp Rotax 912 iS mounted at the back of the fuselage. With its folding wings the airplane is made to be transportable, so customers won't have to contend with the rising cost of airport storage if they want to trailer it back home.
When conceiving the Icon, Hawkins' goal was not so much to target the aviation market as the multibillion-dollar power sports and outdoor recreation segment. The airplane is not meant for transportation. It was not built with speed, range or payload in mind. It is strictly designed to be the ultimate flying toy — a personal watercraft with wings.
However, Hawkins had some serious design goals for his team. The A5 had to, in his mind, be safe and easy to fly. Ease of flight has definitely become an important issue because about 40 percent of the more than 1,250 deposit holders are currently nonpilots. Of course, they will have to become sport pilots or better before they can act as pilot in command of the A5. Another design target was, perhaps, not quite as serious, yet it was equally important. In every way, the airplane had to be, to borrow Icon's term, "badass" to help capture the imagination of the flying and nonflying public. Hawkins' approach was much like Apple founder Steve Jobs' — design was equally as important as function — so Icon's design team was melded with its engineers.
I had a chance to touch and feel the production A5 at the briefing, and I took a turn at folding the wing by grabbing onto a large handle smoothly molded into the wingtip. Icon had initially planned an electrically actuated retraction system for the wing, but it proved too heavy and complex to pull off.
While the wing retraction and reinstallation process was not easy, I completed it almost totally on my own on my first try. I have no doubt that, with a little practice, I could do it solo. In order for the A5 to be street legal, the outer portions of the horizontal stabilizer also need to be removed, a process that is quick and easy. I would estimate the entire procedure would take no more than 10 minutes. I can't tell how long it would take to load or unload the airplane from a trailer, but the A5 was transported to the lake after the briefing and made ready for the next day's demo flights.
In addition to incorporating the handle for the retraction, the wingtip is shaped to allow for planing in case the wingtip is dipped into the water during a takeoff or landing. However, intentional wingtip planing is prohibited. With the big steps on either side of the fuselage, which Icon calls "seawings," you would probably have to do some pretty aggressive maneuvers on the water to get the airplane to tip.
To nail the look of the airplane, Icon brought in German design guru Klaus Tritschler from BMW Group DesignworksUSA to serve as vice president of design. While 3-D software was used in creating the A5, Tritschler's team constructed full-size clay models of the airplane and panel, just like automobile designers do. The process allowed the designers and engineers to touch and see the airplane and to make changes on the spot. "Judging the airplane by looking at a screen is not enough," Tritschler said. "If you see something, it is much easier to develop."
One of Icon's biggest obstacles in the process of designing the pieces of the A5 puzzle was the restriction of the LSA weight limit. "It is hard to make something rock-solid that is light," Tritschler said. The team needed more weight to play with. So Icon Aircraft petitioned the FAA to allow for a weight increase for the A5. After 14 months of contemplating the exemption, the FAA came through, allowing an increase from the amphibious LSA limit of 1,430 pounds to 1,680 pounds with the caveat that there had to be a parachute on board (U.S.-registered airplanes). However, the A5 has a max gross weight of 1,510 pounds since it was the targeted design weight.
The luxury car styling is evident in the sleek lines of the panel and cockpit. Circuit breakers are located overhead to minimize the number of buttons on the panel. The idea was to simplify the panel to remove some of the intimidation new pilots experience when they first strap themselves in to the pilot's seat. Consequently the A5's panel looks like no other airplane panel I've seen.
Annunciations are also simplified. There are common alerts such as oil pressure and alternator, but also idiotproof ones such as "purge bilge" and "land airplane," a prompt the pilot gets with a low battery, failed alternator or fuel pressure issue.
To get the unique feel in the cockpit, the team also designed its own instrument gauge faces, with the exception of Garmin's portable, panel-mounted 796 GPS, which is used for navigation. The target with the gauges, Hawkins said, was to make them easy for nonpilots to interpret. For example, unlike most round-gauge airspeed indicators, the Icon's airspeed needle revolves from the bottom (more like a car's speedometer) rather than the top.
Hawkins' history as a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot brought him to emphasize angle of attack as a primary instrument. The A5's AOA gauge is mounted at the top of the panel centered in front of the left seat. Rather than using the standard concept of chevrons turning from green to yellow to red depending on the airplane's angle of attack, Icon designed a miniature wing as a "needle" pointing into green and yellow arcs or a red line for the critical angle of attack. There are also white dotted lines, one of which indicates the optimal position for the AOA needle during climb and approach. More on that later.
I found all of the gauges to be sleek and easy to read, with the exception of the altimeter, which Tritschler said is likely to be modified.
In the early morning hours, we headed out to Lake Berryessa and traveled by boat from one of the main ramps to a camp that the Icon team had set up on a scenic bluff at the southwest corner of the lake. As we floated along peacefully, two Icon A5s came screaming around the corner in formation in the light of the rising sun. Cool! I thought, yet I was still expecting to use all of my flying skills to keep the airplane in the air, let alone put it safely on the ground or water, when it was my turn to climb into the cockpit.