Kirk Hawkins’s invention has much in common with the European roadsters Hawkins has long admired. It has an elegant interior, leather bucket seats, and a sleek, aerodynamic design. Even its name, Icon A5, suggests a sports-car pedigree. But whereas a Porsche is merely fast, the A5 can really fly.
An amphibious airplane with a 34-foot wingspan and a 100-horsepower engine, the A5 is part of the first generation of a stylish class of “light-sport” aircraft designed for casual pilots. According to Hawkins, founder and CEO of Icon, the plane “allows people who were intimidated by aviation to say, ‘I can do this.’”
Hawkins, MS ’95, MS ’05, says the inspiration for the A5 runs back a long way. “I was a power-sports kid,” enthralled with ATVs and Jet Skis. His interest in motor sports led him to aviation: he spent eight years flying F-16s in the Air Force. Then, while Hawkins was a student at the Graduate School of Business in 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration introduced a “sport-pilot license,” allowing virtually anyone with a valid driver’s license and 20 hours of training to fly.
Hawkins believed that sport flying provided a viable business model for the plane he was dreaming up. Adventurous high-end consumers might become pilots if the right airplane could convince them to get certified. He recruited Steen Strand, whom he had met in a course in Stanford’s product design program, and the two incorporated Icon in 2006. Engineering began that same year, and a flying prototype took off in summer 2008. The company is looking for a permanent manufacturing facility, and expects to begin mass production soon after flight testing is completed later this year.
Hawkins’s flying experience shaped the A5’s functionality, but it was his exposure to the product design program that influenced the plane’s look and feel. Hawkins credits the program’s multidisciplinary nature and consumer-oriented approach for Icon’s product strategy. “We wouldn’t exist without Stanford,” he says. Strand, Icon’s chief operating officer, agrees, pointing out the company’s signature accent color. “That’s why it’s red,” he jokes.
The FAA has 13 design stipulations for the planes sport pilots are allowed to fly: no more than one passenger in addition to the pilot, for example, and a relatively plodding top speed of 120 knots. Established companies and upstarts alike hurried to produce light-sport designs, although their approaches varied. “Most of the companies were making less-expensive versions of their current aircraft,” Strand says. “I wanted to make an airplane look cool.”
The A5 design team saw the restrictions as an opportunity. The plane’s low operating speed demands less aerodynamic precision and therefore allows greater aesthetic freedom. Thus, features like the crease on the nose that Strand points to as a choice made purely for appearance’s sake.
Strand, when asked about the design inspirations for the A5, rattles off Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche and BMW. Many Icon designers first worked in the auto industry, and it shows in features like the A5’s instrument panel—an easily readable set of dials more like a dashboard than the intimidating array of knobs and gauges in a traditional cockpit.
The A5’s wings fold flat against the fuselage, making it small enough to store in most garages, and it can be towed behind a car or truck—in an Icon-designed trailer.
One might assume the biggest barrier to success for the fledgling company would be the cost of the airplane—$139,000—at a time when even wealthy potential customers have been hammered by the recession. And the potential market is relatively small—although growing, the number of licensed sport pilots is less than 5,000. Yet Icon’s order book continues to fill, and Hawkins and Strand report strong interest, especially from overseas. At press time, Icon held deposits on more than 300 planes, enough orders to carry the Los Angeles-based company from the first delivery in late 2010 through 2013. And Icon has no immediate plans to move beyond the light-sport category. “There are so many to be made and sold,” Strand says. “Why bother?”
As for Hawkins, the tough business climate is just another challenge to relish and overcome. “We set extremely high bars for ourselves,” he says. “You’re always pushing it.”
JOHN MAAS, ’08, is a freelance writer in Berkeley.
