I thought the tribe might enjoy a couple of my shots of the ICON A5 amphibious light sport aircraft I shot this week on Cedar Creek Lake. The ICON A5 demo crew, Genesah Duffy, Warren Curry and Gary Knight came to Athens and Cedar Creek Lake and used my buddy’s dock as a water base.

For those not familiar with the Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) classification, it’s a special category designed to be simple and easy to fly with limitations placed on payload and performance. So while not designed to haul the family on a cross country trip, the sweet spot is focused on the sheer joy of flying.

The ICON A5 features a modern design with high end sports car good looks. It excels in functionality when it comes to being amphibious, meaning it will take off and land on either water or land. Besides stunning good looks, it’s fun to fly and features folding wings so you can trailer it, plus folded up on the trailer, it provides more storage options compared to a normal plane.

While exceptionally good looking and well designed, as stated above, it has a limited purpose in life. If speed or anything other than minimalistic payload capability is a requirement, you won’t be happy with the ICON A5. On the other hand, it delivers big on the sheer joy of local flying experience, especially with the doors off and splashing down on your favorite lake.

From a photography standpoint, shooting prop planes well is more challenging than shooting jets. The reason is you should always strive to show propeller motion while keeping the main subject in focus. For flight shots, besides lots of practice, the trick is to select a slow shutter speed to capture the prop motion while using very good panning technique to keep the plane in focus.

For these handheld flight shots I used a Canon dSLR body and Canon 100-400L lens. It’s a good airshow, nature, and bird in flight combo. The shot of Genesah was captured with my iPhone.

That's certainly a questionable aircraft.....some checkered safety history has befallen it in short order since introduction, though some operators were clearly FWS (Flying While Stupid).

Neat plane!

Many pilots would say the neatness ends with the looks. I guess the ones more likely to crash are attracted to them.

Where are those made? I thought I saw some type aircraft made in Fredericksburg.

I'm not aware of any aviation manufacturing in Fredericksburg. (I have contacts there who have not heard of any.) ICON is on the west coat.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Regarding the ICON A5, it’s true there have been some accidents but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything is wrong with the design. While it’s certainly possible I missed something, so far the accident reports I’ve read, and videos I’ve seen, point directly to pilot error.

As I mentioned in my post, in my view it has a limited, non-utilitarian purpose and that is just to have fun flying low and slow with the doors off on your favorite body of water or puddle jumping between lakes. For example, we have a seasonal glacier lake campground that’s surrounded by over 100 flat water, natural glacier lakes all within one county. It would be fun to have it there for the summer to give rides in and explore the area.

After two days of demo flights, my buddies are considering adding one to their toy collection. Personally, if I decide to go low, slow and wet, I'm more likely to build a STOL plane with much more power and payload that I could fly on floats in the summer and skis or tundra tires in the winter.

Plus #1. Also out of my price range!

Beautiful airplane, beautiful pictures!

All airplanes crash!! All airplanes have people that seem to dislike them and so they find reasons to demean them. After almost 40 years in aviation my recollections are that almost EVERY accident is from pilot error to some degree. In today's world it is very doubtful if a plane that was defective in any manner would ever make it to certification. There are very very aircraft failures. Some planes are easier to fly and some are easier to crash. In every case the pilot is the very first one to the crash scene.

Nice plane!