Builders,
In one of the all time great public relation spins in aviation, the CEO of Icon, who was forced to layoff 60 employees yesterday and admit that he was going to fall about 150 planes short of his goal of making 170 planes this year, spun the news as a great win for his company, where they would get to reorganize and come back better…..just as soon as he finds another 20 million dollars in capital. Yes, this is the same company that has 1,800 aircraft on order, claims to have 60 million dollars of investor money (mostly Chinese), was essentially given a factory at the Vacaville airport in California, have a 40 page “buyers agreement” that could have been crafted by Johnnie Cochran working with Joseph Goebbels…….. and somehow, hardly a single “Journalist” in aviation can say anything even remotely cautionary about dealing with them. This is an excellent example that most aviation writers are for sale, or their employers loyalty is to the money people, not rank and file pilots and builders.
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Do not mourn the demise of the A5, even if you loved the look of the plane, the idea of an amphibian with folding wings, or any of the other ideas in the package. I love the look of unicorns, and I think Pegasus’s folding wings are a fantastic improvement on a regular horse, but I don’t feel a loss when I am told we can’t have Unicorns or Pegasus , because they are a myth, just like the A5 program always was. To learn more about aviation unicorns read this: Unicorns vs Ponies.
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Every few years, aviation has another big never-was/investment scam/flop that bursts: Before this there was the Cessna 162 ‘Skycatcher’; before that the Adam Aircraft push pull twin; Before that there was the Carter Copter; before that the “Dream wings” light aircraft; before that the Piper-Lopresti Swift Fury; before that the BD-5, and so on.
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Some of these things were straight financial scams to drive up perceived company value before going public with an IPO, where the principals would cash out. Others were planes intended to be built, that were hopeless designs or impossible to manufacture affordably. One of them was a successful shot at defrauding taxpayers by getting millions from NASA. Here is my central issue: No matter the scam, any real journalist would feel some ethical obligation to explain to their readership that there was virtually no chance for these things to succeeded. But what we have seen time and time again, is that the great majority of the alleged journalists in aviation write glowing stories about each of these companies right up to the end. This can only be explained as these writers 1) being unqualified idiots, 2) be paid in perks like having all their expenses paid on the trip and/or having their ego’s massaged, 3) their employers telling them to write something complementary because the organization is getting a free plane, or 4) The company cleverly got one of the “Photo shoot models” in a string bikini to sit on the mid western married writer’s lap for a few laughs, and the company later explains how this image will make its way onto the net if they get a bad story. Take your pick, but no one rational believes that the writers were totally unaware that their positive story on a company facing doom would be used to line up more deposit checks from people without the math skills to understand that at the current production rate their plane will be done in 855 years.
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If US News and World Report published their 2016 guide to the best Colleges, and you opened it up to find between Caltech and Yale a glowing review of the newly reopened Trump University, specifically citing the political science program internships overseen by the new Dean of Students William Clinton, you would assume the writers children were being held as hostages or something. Such a school would actually have a better chance of being profitable that most of the aviation companies listed above. So why is it that we tolerate our aviation “Journalists” writing glowing stories about companies that most people understand are in very deep trouble?
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Seriously: Icon has been at it since 2008, they have more than 60 million dollars, they have gotten special weight exemptions from the FAA, and they have only been able to produce 7 aircraft. Compare that with the greatest commercial aircraft design of all time, the Boeing 747. In it’s first eight years it went from a rough sketch to being in regular fleet service with Pan Am. and this included building the world’s largest building for the assembly line. Republic made more than 1,000 Seabees in just 24 months in 1946-47.
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I want to be clear that I do have a certain admiration for the CEO of Icon: I was at their home airport, Vacaville CA last month. While having lunch with local guys I was treated to rumors of very lavish company parties held up at lake Berryessa, complete with lots of scantily clad “spokes models”. If this is how he is going through the dough from Chinese investors, more power to him, I hope he has a great time, and they stop buying into US aviation companies.
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Here is an EAA article from a year ago: Note the writer dispatched has never flown in a seaplane before, nor does he have experience in composite manufacturing, nor finance. But the plane and the company gets a glowing review,
https://www.eaa.org/en/airventure/eaa-airventure-news-and-multimedia/eaa-airventure-news/2015-eaa-airventure-oshkosh/07-09-2015-icon-aircraft-to-deliver-first-a5-to-eaa-on-opening-day
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Notice that the AOPA article is hardly different. The EAA and AOPA are membership associations, and theoretically their publications should be first and foremost looking out for the interests of their membership, not the companies:
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https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2015/june/18/icon-a5-is-for-real
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From my 2013 story: Cessna’s Chinese adventure a failure.
“So, who will make America’s light planes? You will, the working American, just as you have always done. In 1946 Cessna went from war production to making 30 C-120’s and C-140’s a day, without any issue at all. The greedy corporate scum had 6 years to tool up and they couldn’t hardly make 30 aircraft per year in China. The only important difference is that the Cessna ownership in 1946 respected their workforce of Americans, and 60 years later Jack Pelton had all his faith in the best $2/hr Chinese workers he could buy. Moving forward, it is clear that Cessna has now abandoned the “affordable” aircraft market. This makes no difference to any homebuilder. In 1946, Cessna was something of a partner to American labor in producing that generation of affordable American aircraft. Today, they have proven to be a worthless element. Each of us, developing our own craftsmanship, will work in our own one plane factory and produce our own aircraft. This is how American labor will build this generation of affordable aircraft. We don’t need cheap labor in China, we don’t need greedy CEO’s and perhaps we don’t need a membership organization that is headed by a person who fails to understand this.-ww.”
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From my 2014 story: Thought for the Day: Importance of Affordable Aircraft :
“Aviation magazines are always highlighting the best, fastest, most elaborate planes with a moronic argument that these will stimulate aviation by getting people interested. Perhaps after decades of this fiction, we can dismiss it. You don’t build a pyramid by making the top block and expecting the base to appear under it. Lasting things are built from the foundation up. No person in sailing would make the foolish claim that the winner of the 1960 America’s cup, (which demonstrated itself as the most expensive and fastest sailboat ever) was important to sailing as the introduction of mass-produced Sunfish the same year. Yet this is the same argument we hear when the EAA puts a multimillion dollar TBM-850 turboprop on the cover of Sport Aviation. -ww.”
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What does a real Journalist look like? A Real Journalist, Bernard Fall
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Note: This story is for entertainment purposes only. I am a grease monkey aircraft mechanic with shallow pockets. If anyone calls their lawyer or sends me a letter, or bans me from Oshkosh, this will only confirm that what I wrote here as humor is coincidentally actually true, and probably make the story go viral, so leave your attorney alone today. It was not intended to be offensive nor harm anyone’s business, just be funny. Love, ww.
