Learning To Fly The Icon A5

The Maker of the Amphibious A5 Lsa Offers Fun Flight Training While Sorting Out Production Issues.

- Pia Bergqvist

After a fitful production start for the A5 light-sport aircraft, Icon Aircraft has regrouped. The company has built a composite factory in Mexico to “improve and control the manufacturing process while simultaneously reducing cost,” says Icon’s founder and CEO, Kirk Hawkins. While the new Tijuana-based composite shop is getting up and running, Icon has opened two training facilities for its A5 amphibian — one at its headquarters in Vacaville, California, and one in downtown Tampa, Florida. A third facility is expected to open soon at an undisclosed location in Texas.

Icon has taken a lot of flack in the past 10 months for a restrictive sales contract that angered some buyers, and for reserving all of the early production airplanes for its flight- training program. But there is a solid strategy behind this apparent madness,Icon promises, and if customers can remain patient, they may end up thanking the leadership team for its decisions.

Why this new focus on training? Hawkins says that of Icon’s 1,800- plus deposit holders, about 30 to 40 percent are nonpilots. Hence there is a great need for training those buyers before they take delivery of their airplanes. Icon had originally hoped it could train new pilots in about three weeks right before delivering their airplanes. But in developing its training curriculum, the company found this goal to be unrealistic. With the availability of A5 training platforms at various locations around the country, pilot training can be spread out over a longer period.

Icon has designed several courses in-house to satisfy pilots and student pilots with a wide variety of flight experience. With Jeremy “Hilda” Brunn, a former U.S. Navy F/A-18 pilot, as the core program developer, the curriculum is loosely based on military flight-training philosophies.