And wasnt their early marketing geared primarily toward non-pilots...where I have seen that go badly before...oh yeah Cirrus did the same thing and had a horrible safety record when they first came out. Slightly off topic...any news on Osh this year?
They are saying AirVenture is still on at the moment. My source thinks they are stalling to get everyone's membership renewals around when they would normally buy tickets. Then they will postpone. They have a date in August that they say they can postpone to. I suspect it is going to get canceled altogether. We are all praying for a cancellation. To get a prime summer week and two weekends of my life back would be unbelievable!
Looks like they have a flight training track for non-pilots and pilots. Whatever than means... I always thought 40 flight hours was the minimum for a private, single-prop pilot license.
There only a dozen or so of these things flying, and only form about 5 years now. They had an engineer( who was also chief pilot) along with another engineer fly into a narrow canyon at a lake and die in a crash. Prior to that a demo pilot landed hard and sunk one...both pax survived. And Halliday was out 'playing' in his and crashed and died. Flying is pretty safe. Flying close to the ground/water and 'hot dogging' isnt. Its lucky there arent hundreds of these flying or we would see tons more of these accidents already. You have a much higher chance of death in a plane when things go wrong vs a boat or jetski etc...
You mean besides all of their own videos and the fact that the designer of the airplane was killed showing off in it?
No way to put any blame on the plane company for this particular one if the pilot was that wasted. Other issues maybe but not this one.
It's a nuanced view for sure. I look at it like this. Say WERA has a rulebook that emphasizes safety. It says all the right things. But, when someone does a 120 mph stand up wheelie down pit lane you and Evelyn give them a thumbs up and take pictures. You probably wouldn't carry much liability in court if something bad happened. In my mind you would have at least some responsibility. I have watched 100's of hours of how Icon interacts with their customers and how they present themselves. As an aviation professional, I don't like it. It's bad for all of us. I think they are fortunate in this case that drugs were involved. I, personally, don't think drugs gave him the idea to fly that way. The guy had 700 hours TT with no other reported problems. Why did he start flying crazy in this airplane?
They are trying to stay in business. I dont know exactly where they are at now. At one point they said they had like over 1,000 orders and were going to be making like 1-200+ planes a year.
Marketing. But you know that. I didnt buy an Icon to just put around at 80 knots. Its a flying jet ski. Woooohoooo! splash
I've seen too many people on too many different drugs, I'd put all the blame on him and his choice to be wasted.
That's what they all say. Every new startup thinks they have some new wiz-bang idea that will revolutionize the aircraft industry. From a regulatory standpoint it isn't an industry that easily accepts wiz-bang ideas.
You're not giving the lawyers enough credit. If Icon has any money left in their pockets the lawyers will figure out how to get it.
It looks like they have built less than 100 of them so far. I've never seen one in the wild besides at shows and stuff. One of my best customers had a deposit on an early serial number. Then Icon came out with the craziest sales contract I have ever heard of. It shifted the products liability to the buyer. It required you to only speak positively of the company. Plus a bunch of other crazy stuff including a huge price increase. They claimed it was a mistake.
What I'm talking about has nothing remotely to do with lawyers or lawsuits. Those don't need a basis in reality to happen.
Oh yeah. They had stuff in that contract about not suing them, "supporting the company" ie. not talking bad about them, a company owned camera in the cabin that you had to maintain all kinds of crazy shit. Some messed up stuff...pure marketing BS
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29224260/inside-roy-halladay-struggle-pain-addiction This article is interesting. It adds some color to the story.