Aviation Innovators: Kirk Hawkins, Icon Aircraft

As part of its occasional series on aviation innovators, AVweb met with the moving force behind the S-LSA Icon A5 stall-resistant amphib, Kirk Hawkins. A person willing to defy conventional wisdom and not afraid of controversy, he seeks to make the excitement of flying accessible to more people.

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Founder and CEO of Icon Aircraft, Kirk Hawkins, spent his formative years in a way many pilots would envy—motocross racing, skydiving, flying little airplanes and ultralights and mucking around with boats. In the process he picked up a private pilot certificate and acquired an understanding of the wide appeal of motorsports, including recreational flying, across our population.

After college, Hawkins went to Stanford where he earned a master’s degree in product design and manufacturing. Stanford’s program heavily emphasized “humanizing” design—looking at the human side of the interface with the product as a primary objective. It integrated human factors (even the most brilliant humans make mistakes, the product shouldn’t kill them for doing so), user friendliness, ergonomics, attractive appearance and making it fun to use. In any conversation with Hawkins it becomes obvious that the philosophy of Stanford’s program closely matched his own and heavily influenced his company’s product, the A5 S-LSA amphibian.

Hawkins’ next step was into the Air Force where he flew F-16s on active duty and, subsequently, with the Air Guard. Following his active duty years, he became a pilot for American Airlines flying the Boeing 757 and 767. He returned to Stanford for business school about the time the FAA put out its NPRM proposing Light Sport Aircraft and the sport pilot certificate. His intense interest in motorsports and the idea of flying purely for fun—the recreational side of aviation rather than the transportation side—focused him on exploring the business potential of Light Sport Aircraft designed for those who wanted to fly because it is a hell of a lot of fun.

Light Sport Aircraft as a Stanford Case Study

Stanford’s business school utilizes the case study method in its program. The business potential of LSA became Hawkins’ case study, leading to an intensive focus and market research into the level of demand for purely recreational aircraft. Hawkins told us that his market research showed that there were a lot of people in the U.S. who wanted to learn to fly each year—his numbers showed 60,000—but that were blocked by barriers to admission. One of those barriers was the needless complexity of the private pilot rating. As Kirk pointed out, a private pilot has to demonstrate the ability to safely fly into the busiest of controlled airports in the country, day or night, yet pilots who want to fly for fun have no need to do so. He pointed out that pilots can legally and safely use 98 percent of the airspace at lower altitudes in this country without having to talk to ATC. He goal was to build an airplane that was designed for pilots who wanted to use that 98 percent of the airspace, would be easy and safe enough to fly for the lowest time pilots and would give them the information they needed to fly safely and stay out of airspace that required contact with ATC.

Hawkins told us that his research indicated that there was a significant level of latent demand for fun flying and that the sport pilot rating would be the ideal entry point for those who wanted to fly for recreation. Plus, if they found that they wanted to continue to add ratings—maybe even fly for the airlines—because they had learned to fly and spent their formative hours as pilots in a world that emphasized stick and rudder flying, they would be much more competent professional pilots than those that started out staring at a screen and using only wide, long runways. Hawkins told us frankly that, in his opinion, the sport pilot certificate is “The safest way to move into transportation flying.”

In our conversation, Hawkins detailed what we saw as a three-prong philosophy of building airplanes for what he described as the pilot who says “Where are my scarf and goggles?” The first level is to make it fun with such things as windows that can be removed easily, for the arm on the windowsill experience that attracts pilots to Cubs. Plus, make it an amphib; allowing some of the most fun flying there is.

The second, more buttoned-down, cautious prong of his philosophy is safety. He recognizes quite frankly that a certain proportion of those who are attracted to pure fun flying are from the “Hey! Watch this!” school of aviation or simply are very inexperienced. They are at risk of either aggressively doing something foolish or innocently making a bad mistake—and getting themselves into trouble at low altitude and low speed. That often means a loss of control event without time or altitude for the pilot to sort out what he’s done wrong before things stop abruptly. Hawkins wants his aircraft to be forgiving enough that even when a pilot messes up at low altitude, the windshield fills with ground and the pilot reacts by pulling the stick back to try and get the nose up, he will have a good chance of surviving. His approach is to design for that error and create an airplane that has a strong chance of safely climbing away from the encounter.

Angle of Attack

An integral part of Hawkins’ safety prong is to reduce the risk of landing accidents through the use of anAngle of Attack indicator for all maneuvering flight and landings. It was something he was exposed to as an Air Force pilot. He explained to us that the military learned more than 50 years ago that using airspeed when landing was an invitation to problems with loss of control, especially during landing rollout, often from flying too fast on final when the pilot was worried about stalling. The AOA indicator tells the pilot precisely what the wing is doing and corrects for weight and flap deployment.

The third subsection of Hawkins’ safety prong is to use tricycle gear. He told us that while there is the macho factor for tailwheel flying, the reality is that even very high time pilots lose control on landing in tailwheel airplanes at a rate two to three times higher than in nosewheel airplanes.

The fourth subsection of the safety prong of Hawkins’ discussion with us about design was to assure, as much as possible, that the pilot receives high-quality flight training geared specifically for the airplane.

Closing out Kirk Hawkins’ approach to aircraft design and manufacturing is his strongly expressed belief in taking responsibility for actions as a method of a manufacturer approaching the issue of product liability exposure. He has courted controversy by insisting that buyers of Icon aircraftsign an involved purchase and operating agreement. In it, the buyer is required to make a number of guarantees regarding who will fly and instruct in his or her airplane. To say it has caused a great deal of comment within the aviation community is to make the understatement of the week. Hawkinssaid that he and his company will be responsible for things they do wrong in the design of their airplane and training of pilots who fly it, and he expects that pilots who fly it will take responsibility for their risk management and operational decisions when flying.

As we wound up our conversation, Hawkins said, “An airplane is the ultimate metaphor for freedom.” We agree. We think his vision for human-machine interaction based on his background in product design at Stanford is a step beyond what has been done previously in general aviation. His insistence on contractual agreement between Icon A5 buyers and the company has gotten the industry’s full attention. We’re going to be watching how the market responds to the offspring of Hawkins’ vision, the Icon A5. Hawkins told us that 40 percent of the depositors are non-pilots—and he wants to bring more people into general aviation. We’re hoping he can.

Rick Durden holds and ATP with type ratings in the Douglas DC-3 and Cessna Citation, is a CFII and seaplane instructor and is the author of The Thinking Pilot’s Flight Manual or, How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It, Vols. 1 & 2.

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