Whether you want to cut costs by sharing a hangar or eliminate them by trailering your plane home, it’s doable with the A5-the process of folding a wing takes less time than you spent reading this paragraph. The landing gear is even narrower at 5 feet, 8 inches. The outboard section of the horizontal stabilizer also unlatches for removal, and once you’ve repeated the process on the other side, the A5 has gone from just shy of 35 feet in wingspan to an overall width of 7 feet, 8 inches. A circular cutout in the outboard leading edge corresponds with a nib underneath the tail, and with a click, the wing locks onto the underside of the stabilizer. Pull the wing out about a foot, rotate the leading edge up, and walk the wingtip back beneath the horizontal stabilizer. The A5 can really fit into a tight spot, though: After you flip a latch under the wing, walk to the wingtip, where there’s a convenient grab handle. The all-composite, high wing could still nestle beneath the Cessna Caravan it was parked nose-to-nose with on the morning of our evaluation flight, but most general aviation birds could do the same. The A5 stands out on the ramp-not because of its size it’s just that the lines are different. So far as the instrument panel is concerned, mission accomplished. The original idea behind the A5 was to make it a plane that was cool and different. By ignoring the surrounding airframe (and that’s easy to do), it’s easy enough to believe the Icon A5 is a lot bigger airplane than a 1,510-pound gross Light-Sport Aircraft amphibian. Despite a seven-knot breeze spreading small ripples across the bay, there was no ricochet off the surface. It all canceled out in one glorious bit of settling into the surface.
The instructor’s voice came through the headsets with the third confirmation of the aircraft’s configuration: Flaps down, gear up for water landing, water rudder retracted.Īfter 9,000 hours of various landing checklists and callouts, including phrases like “gear down, gear checked down” or “down and verified,” ensuring the gear was up seemed counterintuitive-but then again, so is throttling down when just above the water. I veered left-an adjustment for a flock of ducks who’d opted to swim over flying on this chilly January day, but unlike other times flying low over water, we had the power back. We rolled out of a shallow turn onto short final for Tampa Bay as its gray waters filled the windscreen.
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