close. it was a British Overseas Airways plane (Short Solent Mk. III) pretending to be a Pan Am Boeing 314.
Oh, those Hollywood tricksters…
FWIW the ICON A5 small (very small) sea plane advertises their AOA indicator as a primary safety feature of the plane and the gauge figures prominently in the very simple cockpit layout:
Cool. Lots of things are getting cheaper as they get electronic-ified.
And for certification reasons will usually be found only on new models, not the moldy oldies that still make up WAG 90% of the GA fleet (but about WAG2 2% of the advertising websites & cool PR YouTubes).
Sadly I’m now geezery enough, and not directly involved in GA since about 2000, that when I think “GA” or “private plane” really, it’s all about 1950s - 1970s production lightplanes with maybe updated radios. Not much about the stuff built in the last 25 years or in current sorta-production. Which is my limitation / handicap to overcome; thanks for helping with that.
Interestingly, the test pilots at Icon crashed one by trying to turn tighter than was possible once they’d driven into a box canyon. Sometimes the only thing an instrument can tell you is “You f***ed up; prepare to die!”.
Not Icon’s fault, but that same reference also includes an example of another aviation truism: “A fool and his money are soon flying more aircraft than he can handle”.
This Wired article on Icon stall behavior is also interesting, albeit real amateurish. There’s a similar story on the Robb Report that also points out clearly that their target market is rich folks who are not pilots who want a simplified modernized piloting experience that doesn’t detract from having fun.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that as long, ref the Halladay accident, they don’t oversell safety or undersell training to the point the owners are reckless. Said another way, the specifics of how you control an air vehicle and the specific skills needed has changed radically many times from 1903 to today. And will change even more in the near future. But the need to have a safety-first-on-pain-of-violent-death mindset remains at the core. And doesn’t get inculcated from one breezy conversation during a sales pitch.
The old adage that aviation is “unforgiving of carelessness, incapacity, or neglect” may be softening, but it won’t be repealed as long as speed and gravity are involved.
Enough grizzled veteran old-fart philosophy … back to Icon design …
It appears they simply took a page from Ercoupe’s book from the 1930s. Ensure you have yaw & roll stability at high AOA, then ensure you don’t have sufficient pitch authority to actually stall the whole wing, at least from steady-state slow flight. Once you’ve done that the regs allow you to declare a “stall speed” that isn’t really fully stalled while the airplane is still mostly flying. Set your various gauges’ & beeper’s redlines appropriately and viola: it appears you’ve stalled without falling. Magic! But only in the regulatory sense of the word “stall”, not in the aerodynamic sense.
That design is an actual factual safety benefit for distracted or ham-fisted pilots. Heck, the F-16 & subsequent (and Airbus A320 and subsequent) have the same kinds of AOA-limiting features (albeit implemented by computer) for semi-similar reasons. But the test pilot / marketing person’s explanation is carefully more technoyakyak about how they did it than what they did. IMO that’s a bit disingenuous.
The Icon A5 seems to suffer from poor pilots.
Poor pilots or playing at low altitude being just too seductive. Which loops back to my comment about “safety-first-on-pain-of-violent-death mindset”.
@Johnny_L.A’s AOPA article contains this gem
The airplane flies so obediently, and it has such benign handling characteristics, that it gives the false impression it can do anything.
It was a truism in the F-16 back in the day that the airplane was so easy to fly aggressively and so confidence-inspiring that most guys were completely relaxed right up to the moment they killed themselves. It was work to remember just how dangerous it was noodling around a couple hundred feet above the rocks at speed.
I believe the factory accident at Lake Berryessa was informally blamed on a basic terrain recognition mistake. The small blind canyon he turned up was one canyon earlier than a similar-shaped but much larger one with plenty of turning room. One that they often turned into and Chandelle’d back out of. A moment’s inattention took them into the unrecoverable situation that matured ~45 seconds later.
IMO water and recreational airplanes are a potentially bad mix. Folks who play with speedboats, jet skis, water skis, etc., all quickly learn that, unlike cars or motorcycles, crashing in open water is no big deal. The water is (relatively) soft, unlike pavement.
Bringing that thinking into low altitude maneuvering in an underpowered airplane is what the learning theory / training nerds call “negative transference”; a good or neutral habit in one arena becomes an affirmatively bad habit when transferred into another.
Fascinating stuff - thanks. I knew little about the Icon A5 before. Do you think its AOA indicator is all that it’s cracked up to be? Looks pretty great in the video.
It works from a technological perspective, or else the FAA wouldn’t let it be there, even on an LSA-level aircraft.
Like any gizmo, it’s useful to the degree the pilot understands what it’s saying, and pays sufficient attention to it in the situations that info has decision-making relevance.
One area that we use it for, albeit informally, is that it’s always possible for a loading mistake to have us much heavier or lighter than the paperwork indicates. Which has the result that our computed speeds for post-takeoff and for approach would be bogus. If we’re flying the right speed and seeing the wrong AOA, that’s a clue the right speed isn’t actually right.
it’s also a potential lifesaver if we ever screw up and take off with the wrong flap setting. All our planned speeds would then be misleading, but if you fly AOA you’ll not fall out of the sky. Clearing obstacles might be hard or impossible, but that probably went wrong before we really got airborne and AOA first became useful.
Applying the above ideas to the Icon (or any other light GA airplane), the AOA can show you gross overloading. But the poor or absent takeoff or climb performance will probably show that sooner and more emphatically.
Switching gears …
I mentioned a similar idea in this earlier post
that an audio output could help for eyes-out maneuvering. Provided the pilot again knew how to interpret the sounds.
I suspect that the “can’t-stall” training / marketing paradigm of the Icon gets overworked in the pilots’ minds. It’d be interesting to really thrash that thing in steep banks, rapid G-onset pulls, etc., and see how “docile” it is if really provoked. Because it seems that’s the typical crash scenario: zigging and zagging, banking back & forth, then realizing you’re going to overshoot a planned turn, perhaps vs. some obstacle. So you haul back on the stick and … what’s next?
I don’t know, but it’s a pretty good bet it won’t look like the typical slowing-level-flight-approaching-stall-with-AOA-bleeting that you were trained on.
So does the device proactively protect the pilot from that mistake? Or does it, like so many cockpit alarms, merely provide customized “I told you so” theme music to accompany the crash?
Didn’t mean to ignore you. It just took me a lot longer to watch them than I implied in my last post. I really can’t binge-watch anything with my new and un-improved 21st Century attention span. I just finished Ep3.
I’d known the outlines of what Trippe & his company had accomplished, but the shows added a lot of detail. And in a very unsensational measured way. Bravo to the production team who avoided the cheap thrills. And such excellent footage, both old and remade!
Trippe was an amazing dude. A megalomaniac for sure. In today’s world he’d be Bill Gates or Elon Musk; also pioneers who built industries out of some commercial experiments. He personally invented the modern airline and the modern corporate/government entanglement. Vast swathes of technology and technique came out of his company’s work.
Had WWII never happened the 40s and 50s would have been very different. Aviation technological progress would have been slower, but the drastic reset of commerce caused by WWII devastation would also not have occurred. Pan Am might still be a force to be reckoned with even today.
It’s probably a good thing the shows stopped with the details when they did, at the establishment of China service and the start of WWII. Their rundown of Pan Am history from the end of WWII to now was very cursory. The details of that later era would have been frankly rather unsavory to modern (pre-Trump) sensibilities.
I have a small connection to Pan Am. As I was leaving the USAF I interviewed with Pan Am in MIA but was not offered a job. That ~20 minutes in a 747-SP sim is the only 4-engine flying time I have logged or almost certainly ever will log.
A fellow USAF guy I knew was hired by them a couple months later. They were already at death’s door then, it was just a matter of how long the zombie could keep shuffling along while being attacked on every side by newer nimbler carriers.
A year+ later they were lurching from cash-flow crisis to cash-flow crisis. Then came being dismembered. Some small fraction of the elder-most employees were transferred with some small fraction of the worthwhile assets to Delta. What was left behind was even less viable than before and quickly the rest shut down. It was Dec 1991 and I remember the day. Within a couple of years substantially everybody who’d transferred had aged out and retired.
I lost touch with my friend then. A quick search now says he gave up on aviation then and started a conventional ground-bound career. He’s still with the same company, a leader in its industry then and even now. And appears to have a responsible = well paid position. Good for him.
I always thought a good reliable AoA indicator would be useful for maneuvers like doing a steep climb-out at Vx since you can’t really see the horizon in front of you. I got to practice that once, at altitude (the instructor actually had me pull up, at full power, to a full stall), and it’s hard to tell just from looking out the window how steeply pitched up you are.
The flying I did was mostly in the San Francisco and surrounding areas, so Lake Berryessa is well known around here, as is the Icon accident. (Those pictures in some of the above posts appear to be Lake Berryessa, at least the surrounding terrain looks about right.) One of the friends I flew with liked to do canyon flying, which is kind of cool if you live to tell about it. (This post is evidence that we did.) “Don’t become an Icon” was a phrase we used a lot.
ETA: The proverb “A fool and his money are soon flying more airplane than he can handle” was usually applied, as I always heard it, to doctors flying V-tail Beechcrafts.
AKA the “fork-tailed doctor killer”. I agree that was probably the origin of the meme, but since then has grown to encompass bigger better things, from fatcats with warbirds to celebs with bizjets.
Halladay’s problem with the Icon wasn’t so much with the particular type as the whole “airplanes are just harmless fun toys” mental attitude. So my applying the proverb here was borderline inapt. He was a fool, he did have money, but the aerial equivalent of a Vespa was already more than he could handle.
AKA, ‘Doctor Killer’.
The only doctor I personally knew who died in a plane crash was flying a Cherokee. Best not to do low-level maneuvering and counting on winds that might not be there.
If you have not seen it you might find this look in to that accident very interesting (weirdly, his dad was a pilot and he had over 700 hours of flying…you’d think he’d have known better than planes as toys mindset):
On a different subject from my recent posts:
Is it possible to switch from VFR to IFR while in flight? I was watching a video and at the end they note that VFR flight into instrument conditions (IMC) is the most fatal type of weather related accident. That is not surprising but what is surprising is they say 1/3 of all pilots caught in VFR into IMC hold instrument ratings.
You’d think the instrument rated pilots could have a decent chance at pulling their bacon out of the fire but apparently they don’t (at least not always).
Is it because the planes they fly VFR on can’t do IFR flight (IIRC I read somewhere that a pilot really only “needs” three instruments to fly but not sure how true that is or how far that gets them…I think it was air speed, artificial horizon and I forget what #3 was)? Something else?
Missed edit:
Not even sure how true that is. I remember watching a show on the crash of Air France Flight 447 which dropped into the Atlantic 11 years ago. It was night out, flying into a storm and their pitot tubes all clogged up so they had no good air speed indication. It seems without that info the computers on the plane start to have real problems figuring anything out. It is such a fundamental piece of info that without it the automation on the plane pretty much just gave up and sent warning after warning after warning to the pilots. The pilot flying apparently yanked back on the stick, put the plane into a stall and no one noticed till it was far too late.
All of that was to say that when they put test pilots in a simulator and re-created the circumstances the pilots did what they should…aviate, navigate, communicate. Main thing here is the aviate part. Once they realized most of the info they were being given was unreliable they set the throttles and pitched the nose to very particular settings (e.g. 85% thrust and 3% nose up…made up numbers but something like that).
Supposedly, in that configuration, the plane is guaranteed to fly regardless of anything else. You’ve still got problems but the main thing is you are not currently crashing so you have time to try and sort out the other issues.
Tl;Dr: It seems you can fly with almost no instruments if it really comes down to it (at least for a while).
That’s about 4 topics. I’ll try to pick them apart.
First some terminology: IFR & VFR are regulatory & ATC concepts. IMC & VMC are weather conditions.
VFR to IFR w ATC:
Any given flight can transition from VFR regulatory operations to IFR operations under ATC control at any time just by contacting ATC and asking. The converse is generally true as well.
To be legal to operate under IFR, preplanned or not, requires the airplane have appropriate equipment, be recently serviced / calibrated to IFR standards, and the pilot requires both an IFR rating certifying that they were trained & tested to IFR standards, and be IFR current, which requires certain recency of experience in actual or simulated IMC. None of which ATC can verify in real time; they just assume if you ask for it you’re ready to do it.
In addition to the legalities as a practical matter to proceed under IFR into IMC you need the actual hands-on skill to fly in clouds safely and you’ll need appropriate navigation charts for the enroute and approach operations you intend to perform.
The biggest thing you need is the willingness = discipline to change plans and/or fess up if you’re flying into a deteriorating situation. If you know you’re lacking any of the legal requirements the power of wishful thinking may be enough to make you choose to avoid calling ATC. It’s kinda like “Hey Officer; would you mind helping me push-start my car with the expired license plates?”
VFR into IMC:
The majority of VFR into IMC crashes are from pilots who lack the hands-on skill to actually perform IMC flight, regardless of what their license says. Another batch lack the discipline to get connected with ATC while the going is only marginal and then find themselves overtaxed trying to fly and do the administrative radio game to get situated with ATC. Single pilot IFR in a light plane is not easy. You don’t have time to be fumbling around trying to remember how to play this game.
And for sure a bunch of them simply have no real IMC training. During the private pilot course everyone is required to get a little instrument flying. It’s intended to be enough to scare you straight, and, in extremis to let you live long enough to perform a 180 turn in marginal conditions and return to the clearer skies you just left behind. And no more than that. If someone mistakenly thinks that’s enough to fly serious IMC for long and they’re just hoping to pop into the sunshine again in a few minutes, well that hope often amounts to fatal hubris.
There are many pilots who it appears can’t actually fly in IMC but their autopilot can. Until it quits or they mismanage its buttons. Then they die.
IMC also varies in its hazards from simple stratus clouds that only obscure sight of the ground and horizon up through through rain, snow, icing, and wing-ripping turbulence. Some clouds are high above the ground and others hide terrain at your altitude. Which sort of IMC someone blunders into has a lot to do with their odds. Single pilot IFR is hard work. Doing it in even mild turbulence can be busier than a one armed paper hanger. Don’t forget darkness to boot.
As to instruments needed to control the aircraft.
A skilled proficient lightplane pilot can fly with all the usual instruments and has a decent shot at flying with some of the minor ones malfunctioning. The more that goes wrong, the worse the odds get. The less the pilot has really trained diligently recently for so called “partial panel” IMC flying, the more likely it is they’ll fall out of the sky sooner rather than later.
The traditional minimum 3 instruments for instrument flight date from the 1930s. And are as user-friendly as any other aspect of 1930s aviation. IOW NOT! They are “needle, ball, and airspeed” or more correctly “turn needle, slip/skid ball, and airspeed”. With those 3 instruments a pilot can go straight or turn and maintain altitude, climb, or descend. Armed with an altimeter and a compass they can hope to go sorta towards where they want to go and hope to pop out of the clouds before running out of fuel or hitting a mountain.
Flying on the traditional 3 instruments is a totally mentally taxing effort. It’s like balancing a beachball on a broomhandle in your palm. You’re fine as long as you keep everything aligned. You very gingerly perturb things off center by a calibrated amount to turn, climb, etc. And very gingerly restore the status quo when you’re done. A moment’s inattention and the situation can become irretrievable.
Fortunately the semi-modern instruments in typical semi-modern lightplanes are reliable and 2 of the three traditional instruments are merely backups for what you actually use every day. In the latest geewhiz lightplanes the instruments are even better and more reliable. Said another way, the pilots of the more modern planes are likely to be utterly unprepared for a failure. As a practical matter, instrument failure is not the cause of even a tiny fraction of the GA VFR into IMC crashes. They’re substantially all down to inability to keep the airplane right side up for long solely by reference to the instruments.
Big airplanes in general and Air France 447 in particular are a different set of problems.
Simple airspeed failure can be counteracted as you say by setting a known typical power setting and pitch. We have memorized procedures & settings just like you quote. They work, provided you’re still approximately at the right speed to begin with. If the first time you notice the airspeed indications are wonky is when the airplane stalls, setting those “known good” settings won’t save you. In fact they’ll leave you stalled until the ground arrives. Said another way, the canned “known good” settings will keep you in the middle of the air in the middle of the flight envelope if you’re already there. If not you may not presence of mind to figure out how to get back to the middle of the envelope, nor time to look up settings appropriate for extreme altitudes.
In general airliners have 3 independent airspeed systems and the idea is to compared them all and decide which to trust. On AF447 they all quit at once due to IMO inherently defective design. Which then, as you said, confused the heck out of the computers who then did their level best to confuse the heck out of the pilots again due to IMO inherently defective design.
The pilots immediately made some maneuvers, possibly inadvertently, but certainly confusedly, that drove them well away from the correct steady state middle-of-envelope speeds & altitudes. The pilots duly stayed confused with conflicting warnings sounding until the ocean arrived. I hate it when that happens.
Thanks for such a thorough answer.
A great example of why the SDMB is the best board on the internet.
Is there any punishment for a pilot that gets out of his/her allowable flight regime?
Put another way, are pilots scared to contact ATC and let them know they fucked-up because when they land the air police will yank their license?
(I have seen some videos of pilots doing a runway incursion and ATC very politely tells them they need to call a phone number when they land…implication is they are in trouble.)
Well, there is an explicit rule that, in an emergency, a pilot can do whatever he must, and break any rule he feels he needs to break, to deal with the emergency on the spot. But the pilot MUST report the incident to the FAA promptly, and be prepared to produce a detailed written report upon request.
THEN the FAA will decide whether to give the pilot a pass.
ETA:
Well, yeah. He dies. I thought LSLGuy made that pretty clear. 
As @Senegoid rightly says. If a pilot who’s not completely legal for IFR ops contacts ATC, begins IFR operations, and proceeds uneventfully to a safe landing, the FAA is never the wiser. Nobody is auditing these things.
But if something, anything, happens then the investigative folks will poke their noses in and may uncover more than the pilot thinks they can stand for them to. The standard joke / rueful statement in our world is “You don’t want to cheat on [whatever] because that’ll be the flight when a tire blows during taxi and they pull the tapes.” Thoughts along those lines may be enough to dissuade some pilots from calling ATC for IFR clearance when needed.
As well, if the pilot is rusty or lacks the proper charts, they may be fearful that by talking to ATC they’ll give away their unpreparedness which will trigger the controller to “write a citation” which triggers post-flight scrutiny they’d rather avoid. Pour a bunch of wishful thinking about improving weather ahead or the ground-based importance of making their arrival as planned into that cocktail and pretty soon a lot of undisciplined people will make the wrong decision.
It’s also not unheard of for pilots to choose a middle ground, commonly called “bootleg IFR”. IOW, proceeding ahead into IMC without contacting ATC at all. After all, ATC doesn’t know exactly where the clouds are. So the pilot operates as if in VMC under VFR but actually can’t see a thing and may well collide with another VFR airplane doing the same thing.
It’s blatantly illegal and blatantly unsafe, but I’ve seen it done many times. We’re in solid IMC and ATC reports nearby VFR traffic they’re not talking to. We know based on what we (don’t) see out the window and general knowledge of the surrounding weather that there’s substantially zero chance the VFR aircraft is legally operating outside of the clouds. That pilot is simply relying on anonymity to protect them from enforcement and is expecting to encounter VMC before they get to their destination where they can resume legal VFR ops still without having ever talked to anyone. Along the way their plan for IMC collision avoidance is “Big sky, little airplane”. That’s called “careless and reckless operation” and the Feds will pull the pilot’s license pronto if they catch them. Sadly they rarely do.
Another challenge is that these weather decisions are often not black and white; instead conditions slowly deteriorate and any given minute is not hugely worse than the previous. Flying along in the sunny blue aiming at a solid wall of opaque clouds that you eventually enter abruptly is just not the usual trouble situation.
Instead there’s some intermittent cloud layers at various altitudes that you climb or descend to avoid, or perhaps some intermittent rain from clouds above. You can see well enough, both the ground to navigate and the natural horizon to maintain upright flight. Eventually the intermittent clouds below mostly or entirely fill in and now you can’t see the ground well enough to navigate though you still have a decent visual horizon to control your attitude by. Time to get nervous; will there still be that (mostly?) solid deck below at the destination? How far out of your way will you need to go in which direction to find a hole to descend through and will the clouds be high enough above the ground at destination to arrive VFR under them? Unable to know, and how to predict?
As you proceed further along, slowly the inflight visibility deteriorates and the visual horizon becomes less and less distinct. You can still see mostly well enough, with brief moments where you can’t. Perhaps you start zigging and zagging a bit, aiming for the lightest = clearest areas generally ahead. What’s the weather like behind you? Is it deteriorating too, or is it unchanged? In some airplanes it’s easy to look back over your shoulder; in others not at all. If hand-flying in marginal conditions for your skills, a big head movement to look over your shoulder may be all it takes to create spatial disorientation and you just killed yourself.
Even short of “spatial D” you may make enough inadvertent control inputs that when you turn around the airplane’s situation surprises you and you fight for awhile to restore things to an even keel. If you fail you’re dead. If you succeed now you’re good and scared. Most folks don’t make good decisions once scared. Instead of admitting defeat and retreating, the more usual reaction is to press ahead; that seems more familiar somehow. Pressing on is preplanned & emotionally safe, turning around is ad libbing & emotionally risky. Or so it feels. Intellectually, turning around while you still have a fighting chance is by far the percentage move.
But lets not get confused here about the real issue behind these accidents. Calling ATC and filing IFR is nice. But ATC can’t fly the airplane; the pilot needs to do that. Bootleg IFR proves the airplane can fly in clouds w/o ATC assistance if and only if the pilot/autopilot can. Conversely, all the VFR or IFR into IMC accidents prove that if the pilot/autopilot can’t fly IMC, then ATC is no help & the pilot will probably lose control and crash the airplane fairly soon.
Bottom line:
For the marginally skilled or marginally equipped pilot, the real issue isn’t calling ATC or not / filing IFR or not. It’s admitting the flight cannot be safely continued as planned due to weather (or darkness) and making the prudent decision to alter the route or destination to someplace compatible with both your and your airplane’s abilities and the present conditions.