Pilot Briefing

Tragic Icon crash

Baseball’s Roy Halladay dies in his new A5

By Dave Hirschman

The first A5 Icon Aircraft delivered to a customer crashed off the Florida coast November 7, claiming the life of retired baseball great Roy Halladay.

Halladay, 40, was alone in the airplane at the time of the accident, which took place on a sunny day with light winds. He took delivery of the amphibious Icon A5 in October. Halladay and his wife, Brandy, appeared in Icon promotional videos extolling the two-seat Light Sport aircraft. Icon officials called Halladay “a great advocate and friend,” and said they were “devastated” by the loss.

The accident was the third involving an A5 in the last seven months, and the company’s second fatal crash. Jon Karkow, the A5’s designer and chief test pilot, was killed in May along with Icon employee Cagri Sever when Karkow mistakenly flew into a box canyon at low altitude. The string of Icon accidents seems particularly surprising because the A5 was designed to be stall-resistant and is equipped with an airframe parachute and other safety features including angle-of-attack indicators.

Richard McSpadden, executive director of the AOPA Air Safety Institute, recently flew the Icon and remarked on the airplane’s “stability, visibility, and intuitive cockpit layout, all of which enhance safety.” About 25 Icon A5s have been built and registered, and most are being flown at Icon-affiliated flight schools in Vacaville, California, and Tampa, Florida.

Icon officials said the accident airplane was equipped with an electronic flight data recorder and that the NTSB has possession of it. Also, TMZ Sports posted amateur video online that appears to show Halladay maneuvering aggressively at low altitude immediately prior to the crash.

Halladay retired from baseball in 2013 and began flying intensively. The son of a corporate pilot, he earned a private pilot certificate in 2014 followed by multiengine and instrument ratings, and a Light Sport seaplane rating in the A5.

Some commentators on aviation message boards blamed Icon for the crash, saying the company’s marketing promotes risky, low-altitude flying. Icon has rejected that criticism, saying it is trying to enlarge aviation by appealing to a wider, more youthful “power sports” market. The curriculum at its schools emphasizes the inherent hazards of flying close to the ground and seeks to build a safety culture among Icon pilots.

In mid-October, company founder Kirk Hawkins sent detailed “Low-Altitude Guidelines” to prospective Icon pilots spelling out the company’s safety philosophy. In it, Hawkins delivers common-sense suggestions such as “maneuvering more benignly” and moderating pitch and bank angles when flying at low altitudes.

The Halladay accident also comes at a sensitive time for Icon. The company has collected about 1,800 deposits, but it’s fallen far behind its original target dates for high-volume aircraft production and deliveries, and it recently announced price hikes for 2018.

Richard Aboulafia, an aviation industry consultant at the Teal Group, said price increases can be a slippery slope for manufacturers that depend on high-rate production, and tragedies such as the high-profile Halladay crash can make it especially difficult to convert depositors to buyers. “Manufacturers tend to base their business plans on low costs,” he said, “and low costs are justified by high production volumes. Changing either of those variables can bring unwanted complications.”

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Industry News

Sporty’s redesigns ‘Learn to Fly’ course

New content is now cross-platform

By Ian J. Twombly

Until now, if you purchased Sporty’s Pilot Shop’s Learn to Fly course, you were required to choose whether you wanted the course online or in tablet form. Not anymore. Sporty’s has launched a new cross-platform course, allowing users to work online or on their iPad, iPhone, or Apple TV.

Having the flexibility to learn where you want, when you want is the biggest functional change in the new course, but it’s only one of dozens of updates to what was already a good learning experience. Starting in 2008, Sporty’s began to reshoot its private pilot and instrument rating video library in high definition. Newer segments are even in 4K. The result is beautiful, crisp images that run seamlessly. The course interface also has been redesigned. Instead of downloading multiple applications for Sporty’s many courses, users will go to Apple’s App Store and download the free Sporty’s Pilot Training app. From there customers can choose to preview or purchase individual courses that will be synced automatically for use online through the company’s training portal. Initially the app is being launched with Sporty’s private pilot training course, the company’s ForeFlight tutorial, and a full instrument rating course.

Inside the private pilot course, knowledge test questions are logically organized; videos are easy to navigate; and segments are cleverly cross-referenced. When having problems with a knowledge test question, for example, a user can hit a button and automatically be taken to the segment in the video that covers the material. And each task in the airman certification standards has links to corresponding video resources. Sporty’s has big plans for the course that will further integrate functionality.

The app is free. The private pilot and instrument rating courses are $199.99 each, and the ForeFlight course is $29.99. All are one-time lifetime purchases, and past customers have been grandfathered into the new platform.

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Looking for ‘Live’?

AOPA video show expands viewership

With a technology update, AOPA Live This Week is now available in more places than ever. But the change may leave some viewers wondering what happened to their weekly video news fix.

Looking for the week’s general aviation news in a short and entertaining format? So are a lot of other pilots, some of whom may have misplaced theirs. AOPA’s recent change to the way it provides video content means that some viewers of AOPA Live This Week, the association’s weekly video news show, may have trouble finding their news. The technology change means that viewers who watch the streaming video show on iTunes and AppleTV will need to subscribe to a new channel, which they can do online.

“We appreciate viewers making the change,” said Tom Haines, AOPA senior vice president of media, communications, and outreach, and co-anchor of the show. “The new distribution system allows us to offer a better online experience for all of AOPA’s video content.” The change provides for better video search capabilities on the AOPA website and a host of other improvements. In addition, the weekly show is now available on the AOPA app, which pilots can download free from the Apple App Store or Google Play. As always, the show is also available for viewing on YouTube and Roku. Wherever you are, whatever your device, you can watch AOPA Live This Week.

AOPA Live This Week is aviation’s most-watched weekly news program, providing the week’s GA news and features in a concise 20-minute format. Anchored by Haines and Melissa Rudinger, AOPA vice president of government affairs, the show is produced by a team of experienced television and video journalists. The show is produced at AOPA’s video studios in Frederick, Maryland, and the team travels the globe to report on GA. Since its inception in 2012, the show has had reports from Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, Cuba, and throughout the United States. A new show is available each Thursday evening on the AOPA website, YouTube, Roku, iTunes Podcasts (to play on or download to your iPhone, iPad, or AppleTV), and the AOPA app. Viewers can subscribe to a free weekly Email newsletter that highlights the week’s news segments.

LITTLE-KNOWN AVIATION HISTORY

Bernetta Miller (January 11, 1884-November 30, 1972)

Bernetta Miller was the fifth licensed woman pilot in the United States, receiving license #173 in September 1912. She received the Croix de Guerre for service in World War I. Her flying lessons were at the Moisant aviation school on Long Island, New York, where she became a demonstration pilot for Blériot-Moisant monoplanes.

“Of course, I had no illusions as to why I was sent to College Park [Maryland] to demonstrate the monoplane to the U.S. government officials who were exclusively devoted to the idea of the biplane. The Moisant apparently calculated that I could overcome some of the fears others might have of the monoplane. I suppose that this was on the basis of the idea that if a mere woman could learn to fly one, so surely could a man,” she said at the time.

Contest inspires pilots

Diamond ‘doodle’ wins aerial art competition

By Dan Namowitz

Brian Danza is an instrument-rated private pilot who likes to dabble in graphic design. So when he received an Email inviting him to compete in the Wild Blue Doodle contest, a joint promotion of headset manufacturer Lightspeed Aviation and flight-debriefing technology producer CloudAhoy, the temptation was impossible to resist.

The challenge posed to the competitors was this: Use the flight-tracking visualization features of CloudAhoy’s flight-debriefing technology product “to create incredible works of art in the sky.”

For Danza, the chief technology officer of the news and opinion website The Daily Caller, there was an added incentive: a chance to replace his 1998-vintage headset with the first prize of a Lightspeed Zulu 3 headset, and a complimentary annual subscription to CloudAhoy. For his entry, he chose the theme, “DA40 in a DA40,” and traced the likeness of a Diamond Aircraft DA40 airplane above the countryside between Virginia’s Winchester Regional Airport and Eastern West Virginia Regional/Shepherd Field Airport in Martinsburg, West Virginia, from a DA40 rented at Virginia’s Leesburg Executive Airport.

Danza took a photo of a DA40 and charted the image’s outline in Google Earth, using the program’s path-tracing feature to create waypoints. He used a text editor to shorten the waypoints’ standard KML file names and then exported the waypoints, saved to a memory card, to the aircraft’s navigation system as a flyable sequence. The aircraft’s navigation system accepted all the user-generated waypoints, but would only allow 100 of them in a flight plan, so Danza had to add the missing waypoints—about 130 in all—as he flew the route.

Also, because of the route’s meandering form, some waypoints were miles apart, while others were only a few hundred yards apart, requiring some nimble flying and airspeed changes. Danza flew his mission in September, departing Leesburg and flying west beneath the Washington, D.C., Class B airspace until he was able to climb to 3,500 feet to produce his aviation art beneath scattered to broken clouds.

Traffic identified and reported by the airplane’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast In (ADS-B In) equipment was heavy during the approximately hour-long flight—even including a flight of four Van’s Aircraft RV airplanes that crossed his path, which are visible on his video.

Fortunately, Danza never had to deviate from his route, which might have spoiled the image he was tracing in the sky. In mid-October, Danza was notified that he had won the contest, topping runner-up Chad Davis' "Let's Play!" by 29 votes.

Time to retire that old headset.

“The process was really fun,” Danza said.

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