The sweet new Icon A5 single-engine amphibious sport aircraft is designed to be outrageously simple to fly. Why? Two things: a ridiculously well-engineered hull/wing design, and a simplified flight interface that makes the cockpit far less cluttered and confusing.
Inside, the first thing you notice is that the interior doesn’t look like what airplane cockpits normally look like. It looks more like a Tesla, and you’re not overwhelmed by an army of buttons, knobs, and confusing instrumentation.
Arguably the biggest innovation is this thing called the Angle of Attack indicator — a little gauge that combines multiple flight indicators into a single, simplified display. As long as you keep your Angle of Attack in the “green zone” of the indicator, complicated things like takeoff and landing are drastically easier to pull off, even when you’re landing on water. A marvel in the advancement of aviation, one could say!
The A5 has also been painstakingly engineered to be stable and predictable in the air. Thanks to a slew of smart design elements, like wing cuffs and vortex generators, the A5 is completely spin-resistant, which means that it won’t spiral out of control if you go into a stall. In fact, our copilot had me intentionally put the plane into a stall during the demo, and amazingly, I could still maneuver it like nothing was wrong. It’s about as fool-proof as it gets.
Honestly, almost anyone can hop in the cockpit and start flying right away? Technically you have to log about 20 hours of flight time in order to get certified to pilot this bird by yourself, but it’s worth noting that that’s half as long as what’s required for most other single engine aircraft.
That’s what’s so remarkable about the A5. It’s easier to learn, safer to fly, and doesn’t require half a year of flight school before you can legally fly one. In other words, Icon has democratized aviation and made an airplane that practically anyone can fly.
