An Icarus ultralight aircraft crashed with the loss of two lives yesterday, while the story is tragic, the name of the aircraft is a courious choice.
Icarus for those of you who dont know Greek mythology was the son of master craftsman Daedulas (the chap who created the labyrinth for king Minos) the story goes they attemped to leave Crete by flying using wings made by Daedulas using feathers and wax to bond them.
Daedulas warns Icarus not to fly too low or the sea spray will make the wings damp, nor to fly too high or the wax might melt in the suns heat. Icarus ignores the advice flies too high and the wings fail, Icarus then has the long drop and drowns in the sea. The nearest island is called Icaria after him and the sea the Icarian sea.
So you can see maybe calling an aircraft an Icarus might not be a great advertising ploy, bearing in mind Icarus died. It's sort of the equivalent of calling a boat the Titanic.
Actually the story is more interesting than first appears. Some years back an air accident investigation unit studied Icarus accident as a training exercise.
Their finding proved courious. The feathers landed where the wind would have carried them after the wings failed based on where Icarus is thought to have landed after his fall (he would fall straight down while the lighter feathers would be wind blown) the only difference between myth and a real accident based on the story was the cause of the accident. The wax wouldn't have melted.
At higher altitude it gets colder mot hotter, they conculded the wax would have got cold and brittle, causing it to fracture easily.
Did the story ever really happen? Probably not, many attempets at human powered flight have failed to "get off the ground" pun intended, and all too many have died trying.
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