Well, on the brighter side. If one is determined to load up on a boatload of drugs and then get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, the choice of a light seaplane seems far less likely to result in the death of an innocent bystander than choosing something like a similarly priced exotic sports car.
Idiots on drugs crash. It;s not the A5’s fault.
A drug induced stall/spin accident.
100 up votes. Amphibious aircraft are NOT toys.
People who ruin the good name and history of aviation are not heroes; they ruin it for the rest of us…
Yea, you nailed it. At least the drugged up pilot did not hurt/kill anyone else. Perhaps aviation dodged a bullet with his irresponsible behavior…
If it’s not weather and not structural, I think it’s pretty easy to say how a perfectly good airplane was converted into the image that we see at the top of this column.
True, but this is exactly what ICON was trying to avoid with contracts and flight monitoring.
Personally I am never surprised when some sort of fast and furious accident happens.
Nothing to learn from it other than it reinforces the reality that fast adrenaline toys WILL be used as such.
Pointless. If you die, you did it wrong.
You nailed it.
The “cause” is obvious. It was not the weather nor the plane. Why does the NTSB have a problem assigning cause?
Agreed. It was NOT weather and NOT mechanical. why the problem assigning cause???
100 thumbs up. Thank God no one else was hurt!!!
Here we go again. It was a stall/spin. Pilot was an idiot. The airplane is bad. It’s the FAA’s fault. I have heard this for so long for so many accidents, I’m numb.
The bottom line is that it’s none of these. Humans simply consistently take uncalculated risks that put their lives in question and will continue to do so for eons to come. There’s nothing to learn here that should have not been learned long ago.
I agree but I still can’t help believe that Icon’s advertising this airplane as a flying jetski is egregiously irresponsible. Watch their videos of formation flights at low altitude, thru canyons, etc … and “all in 10 hours less time than it takes to get a Private Pilot certificate”. I would suggest that a manufacturer than encourages such risky flying results in higher accident rates than those that don’t but I am open to learning how that would be inconsequential even in this case.
Unlikely to be the last ‘downsizing’ action either.
Be careful what you ask for (or tacitly allow without pushing back) people of Seattle, Washington and environs … you just might get it. Maybe the “normal” population of that State will – likewise – pull up stakes and go overwhelm some other place, too. At that point, the Duwamish people can rightly reclaim their ancestral lands. This isn’t JUST a reaction to Covid-19 economics; there’s ALWAYS more to the story. Always. Boeing didn’t just establish manufacturing operations in Charleston because they needed more capacity. Fill in the blanks.
“Will the last person in Seattle please remember to turn out the lights.”
Larry is on to something.
Seattle has made it quite expensive to live there let alone do business there. Why should Boeing stick around given there are far cheaper options to hang a shingle, never mind the many locations they already have supplemental operations with room to grow. I seriously doubt Boeing will be the last to consider closing shop in that state.
That used to be such a great city to visit and get away to in addition to all the mountainous area I would spend time at while stationed at Whidbey Island. They had cleaned up the city considerably in the years after I left. They they got even worse than it was and then piled the anti-business nonsense on top of it.
“Larry is on to something.” You’re kidding, right? That’s kind of like chasing fire flies in the middle of a train tunnel. I think I hear something, let me turn up my hearing aids Martha.
As has been stated already, the “Left Coast” is a very expensive location for doing business and the cost of living for employees is very high as well. This, of course, drives up the sticker price on the product offered. This is probably a great time to start “remodeling” Boeing but the key feature needs to be changing the “flavor” of upper management. The money people need to be sidelined to desks and taken well out of the management part of the business. They are necessary but should not be in charge. Their sole focus is always on the bottom line and stock prices. That attitude is, I am thoroughly convinced, the main cause of Boeing’s woes today. Quality control in the 73, the 78, and the KC-46 are poor based on issues reported by customers and the FAA. Making high quality aircraft requires, obviously, attention to detail and that hasn’t been happening at Boeing. Relying on a single point of failure (AOA), misclamping fuselage sections during mating, FOD in the fuel tanks and boom issues are all problems Boeing never faced before. They have to be the result of shortage of quality control people and front line managers feeling the pressure to “do more, faster, with less people”. Look at the WWII crunch with the B-17. I am sure that they had some issues with quality control but my father’s generation rode those planes into battle and I don’t remember those men complaining about them being POSs. One can easily find, via an extremely short internet search, almost unlimited photos of the -17s coming back to England in various states of extremely bad disrepair from combat damage. But, they were sturdy and CAME BACK! I am not al all sure that some of today’s Boeing products could make that same claim with equivalent level’s of damage. Note I qualified that with the word “equivalent”.
It is long since past time for Boeing’s Board to get their heads out and get real managers in the the slots and get the money people in their own “wing of offices” where their damage can be minimized.