Water landings in amphibious aircraft are no cause for alarm, but that’s a message still making its way to the general public. An aircraft reported to local police as having crashed off the coast of Maine last week was just an Icon A5 setting down in a routine water landing. Derek Tam-Scott, Icon Aircraft’s head of communications, tells AVweb that calls to police reporting A5 water landings are not uncommon. “It happened several times in New York City in 2015 when people driving on the George Washington Bridge saw the plane landing on the Hudson River.”
Tam-Scott told AVweb the aircraft causing a stir last week was serial number 20, delivered to a customer in July. The customer is basing the aircraft off their yacht and making their way up the East Coast. Photos suggest the ship in question is the Axis Yacht Support vessel (formerly christened the Fast & Furious), which is designed to carry helicopters or watercraft as a support ship for a passenger-carrying yacht. The ship’s crane, designed to lift vessels up to 12 tons onto the aft deck, appears to have no problem with the roughly 1,100-pound A5.
