AirVenture: Icon Gets Weird and Huerta Hews to Form

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What of Icon?

One of the airplanes we hoped to cover here at AirVenture was the new Icon A5, an amphibious LSA that the company says has the potential to reset the entire market. Well, maybe. It’s sure a good-looking airplane. Icon promised us a trial flight then, without explanation, abruptly withdrew the invitation. This has happened before at AirVenture and frankly, it doesn’t upset me too much. Doing a flight trial here at the show is not the best way to evaluate an airplane because such demos tend to be rushed and you really need a full day to do them right.

But then things took a bizarre turn. The company’s PR rep called and said in addition to no flight trial, the company wouldn’t offer any interviews nor could we shoot any video of the airplane. Further, when the flight review was proposed, Icon hinted that it wanted control and approval of what video we did shoot and wanted a list of questions to be asked. If Icon is showing the world how an LSA should really be built, it’s also showing the world how not to do marketing and communication. The reason companies come to AirVenture is to show what they’ve got and that includes unfettered press access to the products and the leadership of the company. If they can’t explain and promote themselves and answer the occasional hardball question in this venue, how will they do when the going gets rough with deliveries, customer service and the inevitable rough spots?

What coverage the A5 has gotten so far has amounted to one long sloppy wet kiss from the aviation press and maybe the airplane deserves it. I sure hope so. And while I surely understand a company wanting to tightly control its image, that goes only so far. Any credible company needs to stand up on two feet and answer all the questions thrown at it. We’ll see if Icon matures and figures that out.

Bose A20

In today’s “Top Ten Reasons You Know You’re At AirVenture” video, we included some bloopers, of which we have many. One I didn’t include was one that occurred when I was recording an interview with Bose’s Hratch Astarjian on the company’s new A20 Bluetooth upgrade. Accidentally, in the middle of the recording, the headset I was wearing linked with a Bluetooth source and began playing music. Really nice music.

In fact, the audio quality was so good it startled me for a good 20 seconds before I stopped Hratch so we could reconfigure and resume the discussion. Also, when you watch that video, note the voice audio quality—it comes through even on the YouTube feed. If you’re not using Bluetooth for music, you really should consider it. It so enhances the experience of flying that I almost consider it a no-go when I can’t pair up with my playlist. And Bluetooth headsets do this seamlessly, making them one of the easier gadgets to use. If you’re still at the show, check out this upgrade in Bose’s booth (283). Bluetooth capability will be standard on new A20s and you can upgrade an older A20 by adding a new cable.

Be the PIC

We’ve said this before, but I think in the name of safety, it needs to be said again: When you fly into Wittman Field during AirVenture, you need to bring your A game and that entails two things: being sharp on listening to the radio and complying with instructions and tuning out and resisting the urge to get outside your own envelope (or the airplane’s) just to satisfy an amped-up controller.

On Wednesday morning, a Malibu crashed while landing on Runway 27 and if there’s a characteristic accident at Oshkosh, that might be it. We don’t know the specifics yet, but it might be similar to the Jack Roush crash in 2010. Recall that Roush crashed his Beech 390 jet when attempting a go-around on what turned out to be a tight approach with what he thought was a potential conflict. The NTSB ruled that Roush had failed to execute the go-around properly and stalled the airplane. He was injured badly enough to lose an eye.

During that arrival, Roush was flying the jet in a way that he normally would not have: a tight carving approach that’s typical of the multiple aircraft arrivals to the same runway here at OSH. Remember that ATC uses non-standard runway separation during AirVenture and while I don’t consider this unsafe, it has less margin than you enjoy at your home airport where a tower applies sequencing and standard separation. And then some. Controllers (and pilots) are good at making this work at Wittman, but some are better than others.

There’s a certain intimidation factor here that pilots just have to ignore. I was listening on frequency Monday when I heard a controller tell an airplane, rather urgently, to “tighten it up, tighten it up, tighten it up.” He was already in a steep banked turn headed for Runway 27. As a pilot, you need to do your best in this circumstance but resist the urge to overdo it. There’s always a danger of hauling back on the stick to the point of stalling the airplane, just to satisfy that command to tighten it up. Well, don’t. If you can’t make the turn safely, or you can’t make the green dot without smacking the airplane onto the runway like a dead bug, then don’t. Someone might have to go around or turn out of the pattern and that’s a better outcome than a stall/spin short of the runway, which has happened here.

No matter what’s happening on frequency, don’t surrender your authority to operate the airplane safely and understand that controllers will build in—or should build in—enough margin to accommodate a pilot who can’t comply with an instruction without exceeding his or the airplane’s limits.

Why Does Huerta Come Here?

Maybe FAA Administrator Michael Huerta should stop bothering to come to AirVenture. Traditionally, administrators have done a Meet the Boss session, plus press availability. But Huerta’s dissembling non-answers and sidesteps of the most benign questions have become somewhat of a joke, and not a har-har joke, but a pathetic one. Give the man credit though; he is a skilled survivor at the highest levels of government bureaucracy.

I have yet to hear Huerta offer a substantive answer on the burning issue of the day, the reform of the Third Class medical. But this week, he reached a new low, suggesting that pilots should contact their congressional representatives to urge action on medical reform. Isn’t this tantamount to saying I can’t do my job, please have congress force me to?

GA’s relationship with the FAA has, under Huerta, eroded to a point I never thought it could reach. And given that the FAA feels it no longer has to respond to legitimate press inquiries, ours is even worse than that.

No Brass Ring

My skydiver friends attempting a world-record sequential jump over AirVenture came up short on Friday. The base formation looked great, but evidently the sequences didn’t work out as planned. I can say from personal experience that this isn’t the first time this has happened. Such a thing is dauntingly difficult under the best of circumstances and doing it at a big airshow with the distraction and demands of a tight timeline doesn’t make it any easier.

It was still a great show, though. I watched Friday’s jump with my friend Duffy Fainer from the airshow announcers’ booth. As they usually are, the breakoff and canopy openings were spectacular. Maybe next year.

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