AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - November 2012 - 64

I WAS IN A STATE of shock the first time I saw N612WF. A tornado had just struck the 2011 Sun ’n Fun Fly-In, and the gorgeous burgundy AirCam with fewer than 30 hours on the Hobbs meter had been ripped from its tiedowns and slammed onto its back. The airplane looked like a total loss, along with dozens of other similarly unfortunate display aircraft. Fricke, a former Vietnam War helicopter pilot and executive, isn’t easily deterred,

and he decided right away to have the badly damaged airplane rebuilt at the AirCam factory. The engines, instruments, and Clamar floats were undamaged, but the vast majority of the airframe would be painstakingly replaced during the next 14 months. Phil Lockwood, the soft-spoken perfectionist who designed the AirCam and manufactures the kits, test flew Fricke’s rebuilt airplane in May and pronounced it the best-looking of 187 finished to date. Seeing 612WF again at the Sebring factory, it was hard to disagree. The gleaming airplane had recently completed a series of test flights and it was ready to go north to its new home in the land of 10,000 lakes. Fricke was too busy with VAC work to make the trip himself, so I kept pestering Fricke until he said I could ferry it in his place. Harrop enthusiastically agreed to come along and tell the story in video. After a local familiarization flight with Lockwood, Harrop and I loaded our gear into the storage lockers at the center of the floats, and I asked Lockwood for any lastminute advice.

“Don’t hurry,” he said. “If you’re trying to get somewhere fast, you’re in the wrong airplane. Just take your time, fly at 75 miles an hour, and land before the fuel gauges get below a quarter tank. If you do those things, you’ll really enjoy the experience.”
I’VE LONG HAD A multiengine rating, and I recently added a single-engine seaplane rating, but flying the amphibious AirCam on and off the water requires a multiengine seaplane rating. Fortunately, Richard Johnson, a veteran seaplane pilot and instructor at Winter Haven’s Gilbert Airport in Central Florida, provides such training in his own AirCam. We met on a Sunday afternoon and made several flights, and he arranged for a checkride with seaplane legend Chuck Brown the next day. The first thing you notice about a floatequipped AirCam is its hulking size. It towers above wheeled AirCams, and performing a preflight inspection or putting fuel in the tanks is like climbing a jungle gym. The AirCam is designed for redundancy and simplicity, and the systems are as basic as they can be. Each 100-horsepower Rotax ULS engine, for example, is fed from its own 14-gallon fuel tank. There’s no way to crossfeed fuel from one tank to the other; mixture control is automatic; and fixed-pitch props can’t be feathered. The floats don’t have water rudders, so steering is accomplished with differential power (and the air rudder). On land, the floats have free-castering nosewheels. Gear retraction and extension on Johnson’s airplane is hydraulic, with a hand pump and a pilot-operated one-way valve to move the gear up or down; on Fricke’s airplane, the gear is electric. AirCams are sold as kits, not complete airplanes. Kits sell for $49,000; a pair of new Rotax engines and props adds $54,000; and avionics and paint typically cost another $10,000. The 25-employee factory produces up to 24 AirCam kits a year. From a design standpoint, the AirCam is almost comically overbuilt. It can take off from a standing start on one engine, yet it has two. A single float has enough buoyancy to keep the entire aircraft at gross weight (2,100 pounds) above water, yet it has two. Full power results in about 5,400

64 | AOPA PILOT November 2012

AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - November 2012

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