A few years ago I said, on the Atlantic's web site, that all I wanted for Christmas was a flying boat. Now that you ask, I was thinking of the spiffy new amphibian Icon A5, then still in development in Los Angeles.
Sadly, no one pays attention to my dreams and wants. But I have buffered my sorrow on this front with (a) the used Cirrus SR22 that I was able to buy on return in China, and in which I am due for some recurrent training after a long time on the road; and (b) news of Icon's continued progress toward going onto the market.
There's still time for someone to get my years-ago wishlist into Santa's hands and make something happen. In the meantime, here is video from this week, of the Icon passing an important airworthiness test. The FAA has approved it as "spin resistant," and the test video, apparently shot in the Mojave, does a very good job of explaining just what that means and why it matters.
The section beginning at time 1:45 gives you a very clear idea of what a stall and subsequent spin look like, and how the Icon behaves in stall/spin circumstances. To oversimplify: an airplane's wings (not its motor) stall when the plane is attempting to climb too steeply*. This kind of "stall" is crudely comparable to your inability to keep climbing a steep hill with a bicycle still in its highest gear. Then the spin is sort of like the bicycle's tendency to fall over to one side when you can't keep it moving forward fast enough. You'll see the non-Icon airplane in this film, a Cessna 150, enter this kind of stall and, in its spin, essentially fall out of the sky. For more, see Wolfgang Langewiesche's classic Stick and Rudder ; sample spin-related excerpts are here.
The best way to learn is get some training yourself -- ten years ago, I went through several sessions of spin-recovery training, which I didn't enjoy but which gave the an idea of what a spin looked and felt like, so as to avoid ever getting into that circumstance in real life. Good to see an airplane whose design aids in that goal.
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* To be more precise, a wing stalls when its "angle of attack becomes too high for a given airspeed, weight, angle of bank, and so on![]()
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Sadly, no one pays attention to my dreams and wants. But I have buffered my sorrow on this front with (a) the used Cirrus SR22 that I was able to buy on return in China, and in which I am due for some recurrent training after a long time on the road; and (b) news of Icon's continued progress toward going onto the market.
There's still time for someone to get my years-ago wishlist into Santa's hands and make something happen. In the meantime, here is video from this week, of the Icon passing an important airworthiness test. The FAA has approved it as "spin resistant," and the test video, apparently shot in the Mojave, does a very good job of explaining just what that means and why it matters.
The section beginning at time 1:45 gives you a very clear idea of what a stall and subsequent spin look like, and how the Icon behaves in stall/spin circumstances. To oversimplify: an airplane's wings (not its motor) stall when the plane is attempting to climb too steeply*. This kind of "stall" is crudely comparable to your inability to keep climbing a steep hill with a bicycle still in its highest gear. Then the spin is sort of like the bicycle's tendency to fall over to one side when you can't keep it moving forward fast enough. You'll see the non-Icon airplane in this film, a Cessna 150, enter this kind of stall and, in its spin, essentially fall out of the sky. For more, see Wolfgang Langewiesche's classic Stick and Rudder ; sample spin-related excerpts are here.
The best way to learn is get some training yourself -- ten years ago, I went through several sessions of spin-recovery training, which I didn't enjoy but which gave the an idea of what a spin looked and felt like, so as to avoid ever getting into that circumstance in real life. Good to see an airplane whose design aids in that goal.
__
* To be more precise, a wing stalls when its "angle of attack becomes too high for a given airspeed, weight, angle of bank, and so on
