Ex-military pilots (like some on the ICON team) love AoA because it’s religion in the military. To them, it seems shocking that GA pilots are still flying based solely on airspeed. I’ll admit that, when landing on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier at night, AoA is probably a great tool. But for the average Cherokee pilot landing on a 5000 ft. runway, the situation is quite different.


Airspeed control on final approach matters a lot more than a new instrument in the panel.

Here’s the simple fact that most AoA proponents know, but don’t like to admit: airspeed is a great proxy for AoA most of the time. General aviation pilots fly in a very small envelope: +/- 10 degrees in pitch and 30 degrees of bank in most cases. Within those boundaries, monitoring airspeed is a perfectly good way to keep from stalling. If you’re doing aerobatics or flying a jet at FL410, an AoA instrument may be essential; in the pattern in a 172 it’s not going to tell you much more than the airspeed indicator.

Besides looking at the instrument, pilots have to know how to react to its indications. For the GA pilot struggling to log 25 hours in a year, the physical stick and rudder skills may be more important than the recognition skills.
An AoA instrument also won’t help the idiot who buzzes his girlfriend’s house at 20 ft and pulls up at 3 Gs. Neither will it prevent the over-gross takeoff on a hot day that eventually results in a stall. These scenarios are both depressingly common, and get grouped under the “loss of control” heading.