You’re on fire with your comments in THIS blog, Jim !! I’m on MY way to put the cowl on my 172 so I can cut some holes in the sky today, too.
Your dollars and cents analysis is exactly the basis of most of the comments on the Icon affair. Why the heck would I want to part with what they want for that thang when for less than half I could have a well proven RV-7 hotrod that provides most of the tenets I described above? If the FAA would just get off of it’s you know what and provide the MOSAIC plan that the Administrator spewed during the “Meet the Boss” forum at Airventure … small companies COULD attack that market and need. Vans and Synergy proved it could be done and at a profit, too. And those with existing well proven low end GA could fly them, as well.
To me – personally – I’m likely never gonna see any of it while I’m still invading the 3-D world. And I don’t have time to do my own bulding. But IF I could custom order just the right airplane, who knows. For most people, there IS a correct price where they’ll take the plunge. Unfortunately, it’s mostly the older folks who have that disposable income. Not until we find a way to get the younger folks into their own airplanes at a price they can afford and justify will things change. A $400K C172 AIN’T it.
Now then … my cowl awaits … and I’m going to an EAA program tonight. I think I have that “bug.”
The Aviation Industry doesn’t need another wiz-bang aircraft it needs ‘real Tort reform’. Instead of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build an autonomous electric VTOL, we need to hire the “Next Gen Lobbyist”.
Lobby states to focus their transportation laws to be more like their ‘Jaywalking Laws’. You get run over while Jaywalking the driver is not held responsible. Basically Jaywalking is a death sentence. As it should be. All transportation is dangerous and our laws should reflect this fact. Instead, you get injured or die in an aircraft and everyone becomes responsible. The company that built the aircraft 50 years ago, the company that designed the engine, the person that previously owned the aircraft and on and on.
And THAT is why – when an airplane is sold on our little airport – we usually only do a ferry permit vs a full blown annual. That way, only min crew are aboard and maintenance liability mostly ends when it gets to the destination. Isn’t it sad that we have to think this way, Klaus.
BTW: My '75 C172 cost ~$22K new. To think that an equivalent (albeit somewhat better) airplane is 20 times that is down right criminal.
I can’t help thinking one reason Icon has lasted this long is that the executives, even if some of the cast of characters has changed, have been on the payroll since Day One. It’s possible to imagine a Hollywood reboot of “The Producers” using Icon as inspiration. Roll Eclipse into it and you could end up with something seriously funny.
I have a technical question for Paul B via-a-vis the Icon A5. How did you find the cabin noise levels with that Rotax right behind your head?
About 10 years ago, I test flew a nifty similar configuration LSA compliant airplane called the Sky Arrow 500 at Sebring. It was a tandem tricycle configuration pusher T-tail with a high mounted Rotax 912. With a front seat well forward of the wing and main gear and a side stick and L throttle, it gave the feel of a mini “fighter.” With modification, folks with leg incapacitation could ingress/egress easily and fly it. What I remember most about it was the “fun factor” followed closely by high ambient noise levels inside of it. It never took off despite what would (now) be considered a bargain price of ~$120K as I remember it. Looking at it from the side, it was similar to the Icon.
I see that it’s still available albeit from a different company and with different numbers:
skyarrow.it/aircraft/
People can just get a jet ski or a motorcycle for dirt cheap and have just as much weekend adrenaline rush. No lengthy training required.
No high insurance cost.
No expensive yearly inspections.
No problem with storage.
Easy to resell.
Current pilots have a hard enough time justifying the costs of a used $60K IFR 4 place Cherokee to their wives.
This is why I when Icon announced their plans, I never believed that they would never sell many planes. Selling adrenaline to non-pilots for $400K is more of a business model for drug dealers, not aviation.
I have been flying 20 years and got jaded after loss in Hurricane Florence. Wife gets claustrophobia in one door plane. Insurance went up 500%. Bought a CTSW that turned out to be a twitchy piece of flying crap, glad it’s gone. The only real safety features on newer planes are ones with a ballistic parachute. iPad was more reliable than glass cockpit.
Most of the newer planes I looked at with a view to purchase are still on the market 7 months later.
That tells me I got out in time. Considering the good economy the future does not look promising for private flying.
I didn’t measure the noise level, but I’d say it’s comparable to a Searey and didn’t seem that much noisier than a tractor-mounted Rotax. You can judge it from the audio clarity of the video. We had the windows out so that probably adds a little noise. But as I noted in the in the video, windows-out flight is surprisingly wind free and not too noisy.
For naysayers. Icon Aircraft after being unlimitedly funded to afford 200,000 aircraft deliveries, in a period of 20 Years, and at the present price producing a revenue of $80 billion in paths 20:years period, would stand a chance of achieving a reasonable ROI. Just sayin’ - I see light at the end of the runway. Don’t ask how I pulled this out of my intellect.
Instead of focusing on the “what-do-we-call-NOTAMs” nonsense, how about talking about why Robert Sumwalt (former NTSB chairman) said “That’s what NOTAMs are. They are just a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to”? He was speaking in reference to the Air Canada near-disaster at SFO, where the pilots almost landed on a parallel taxiway instead of a runway.
John King wrote an excellent article about NOTAMs and how he thinks they need to be fixed: https://www.flyingmag.com/why-notams-are-garbage/. I won’t go into details from it, except to say that he’s especially right about one thing…there are too many NOTAMs and the NOTAM system doesn’t give visibility or clarity to the critical ones. He highlights the fact that the Air Canada pilots missed a critical NOTAM (Runway 28L closed) because it was buried on Page 9 of 28 (TWENTY-EIGHT) pages of NOTAMs.
For months, FAA has been pushing airports to get rid of NOTAMs that were no longer valid (especially PERM - “Permanent” NOTAMs, there were a lot of them out there). That’s just a band-aid, the problems that Sumwalt and John King won’t be fixed until FAA overhauls the NOTAM system.
Sad that the very first comment on this article was a political diatribe that had absolutely nothing to do with the article.
Regarding the actual content of the article, I hope this move actually does help clean up a lot of the garbage that is floating around in the NOTAM system. Next, they should work on fixing the equally-broken TFR system.
Surely, any attempt to make NOTAMS more useful would start by DITCHING THE USE OF ALL CAPS AND NDLSS ABRVNTNS, holdovers from the era of teletype and wet fax machines.
As P.D. alluded to, the big change (#1 of 14) in the AC (72 Pages) is the definition of NOTAMs.
It is now Notice to Air Missions (not Notices or Mission, but Notice and Missions) and no longer Notices to Airman!
Don’t get caught defining NOTAM’s improperly or demerits will somehow be issued I’m guessing!
Does anyone else see the irony of the “NOTAM EXPLAINED” graphic at the head of the article?
Take away the “explanations”, and try reading the NOTAM in its broadcast form–not a lot of useful information there.
As explained in the article, NOTAMS format is a holdover from the old teletype days. Why not just say it in English–or in chart form? In the example–the entire point of the NOTAM is simply listed as “OID90 Activated”–without telling WHAT the purpose and use of OID90 is and how it may affect your flight. No “news you can use” THERE!
Is it any wonder why the information to be disseminated in NOTAMS is so often not used today?
May I suggest, #1 was the ONLY reason changes were made to the underlying nomenclature of NOTAMs. And it appears that the sole difference between my (removed) submission and yours was my use of the apparently “radioactive” term “pr_de” … filling the underscore with the letter “i” of course (to confound the censoring algorithms.)
The very first response addresses exactly the issue we are presented with. Those 14-odd other “updates” to the NOTAM system is akin to what journalists call “burying the lead.” The “lead story” is reconfiguring the NOTAM nomenclature to satiate and quell the political winds.
You’ve been around aviation and AvWeb as least as long as I have, so frankly, you should know where all this is headed. You should know that the existing NOTAM system is a vestige of WW-2 communications, when data transmission used acronyms to compress the message. You should know that the advances of computer technology today should lend itself to the elimination of text messages entirely, and begin using audio-visual messaging.
Call it a “diatribe” as you must, but I stand by my original submission.