Enthusiastic pilot was among first to fly aircraft model

LOS ANGELES — The tiny sport plane Roy Halladay was flying Tuesday when he fatally crashed into the Gulf of Mexico was made for entry-level pilots like him, though the plane’s chief designer and test pilot died while flying one this year, officials and experts said.

Halladay had been the proud owner for less than a month of his ICON A5, and was among the first to fly it, with only about 20 in existence, according the website for ICON Aviation.

In one of many enthusiastic tweets about the plane, Halladay said it felt “like flying a fighter jet.”

Rolled out in 2014, the A5 is an amphibious aircraft meant to be treated like an ATV, a piece of weekend recreational gear with folding wings that can easily be towed on a trailer to a lake where it can take off from the water.

“The way that a lot of people described it is a Jet Ski with wings,” Stephen Pope, editor-inchief of Flying magazine, told the Associated Press Tuesday. “It’s really a plaything.”

The man who led the plane’s design, 55-year-old John Murray Karkow, died while flying an A5 over California’s Lake Berryessa on May 8, in a crash the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board blamed on pilot error.

Pope said “the plane itself is great,” but he had concerns about Halladay, a new pilot with little flying time, taking the craft out over water at low altitude, though the plane was marketed as a craft that could do that.

“They still think that that’s the way the airplane should be flown, and there are people in aviation who completely disagree with that,” Pope said. “They think you should not have a low-time pilot flying low over water.”

Low flying was part of the problem when Karkow, the designer, crashed, according to U.S. federal investigators.