Even as commercial aviation groans under the weight of multiplying woes—rocketing fuel costs, grumpy passengers, and shrinking profit margins—a handful of airplane manufacturers are gearing up to exploit Federal Aviation Administration regulations that carve out a niche for small, ultralight recreational aircraft.
On June 12, ICON Aircraft, a privately held startup based in Los Angeles, took the wraps off a sleek new plane its designers say could make aviation as common a hobby as water skiing or motorcycling. Dubbed the A5, the small, futuristic aircraft, which features folding wings that tuck neatly under a slim rear tail, looks like a cross between a Lamborghini and the very light jets popular with globe-trotting executives. The plane is about as long as two compact cars parked back-to-back, with a wing span of 34 feet. When it finally rolls onto runways sometime in 2010, the A5 will cost about $139,000.
The lilliputian airplane is the brainchild of Kirk Hawkins, ICON's founder and CEO. A former U.S. Air Force pilot, Hawkins began working on his idea in 2004 as a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He envisioned a new kind of aircraft company that would "merge airplane design with consumer products to create great experiences, like BMW (BMW) or Apple (AAPL)." The product of that vision, the A5, is Hawkins' bid to transform an industry dominated by vastly complex commercial aircraft designed specifically for transportation.
Pared-Down Piloting
In 2005, he recruited fellow graduate student and serial entrepreneur Steen Strand, a former IDEO design engineer and now the company's chief operating officer, to come up with the product itself. Backed by a board that includes IDEO founder David Kelley, Vern Raburn, the CEO and founder of very light jetmaker Eclipse Aviation, and Stanford lecturer Jim Ellis, they staffed up, and with a team of 15 have been working on the A5 ever since. (The company won't disclose how much financing it has raised.)
To make the aircraft broadly appealing, Hawkins and Strand pared down the piloting experience to its essentials. The A5 eschews the complex cockpit controls common to commercial planes. Instead, a simple rack of analog gauges lines the cockpit's center console. The company is clearly following Apple's playbook: Like early computers, suggests Hawkins, contemporary aviation is alienating to average consumers. "There's a lot of Tandy out there, but no one looks like Apple," jokes Hawkins, referring to the crop of planes that will compete with the A5. Most are stripped-down versions of more complicated craft or so-called kit planes that buyers must assemble themselves.
In contrast, the A5 is all about simplicity. "We also bucked the industry trend of cramming all the controls onto one digital screen," says Strand. "We wanted to give a sense of accessibility and, above all, reliability."
20 hours of training
The A5 is one of the first planes explicitly designed to cater to a freshly minted market that experts estimate could be worth as much as $2 billion annually. It stems from a 2004 FAA ruling that established a new Light Sport Aircraft category. This new class, as well as an easier-to-obtain Sport Pilot License, simplifies access to the skies for private individuals. The certification requires just 20 hours of flight training and costs between $3,000 and $4,500, about half the time and cost of the previous, easiest-to-obtain license. (Planes in the new category are strictly restricted to two occupants, must weigh less than about 1,300 pounds, must fly below 10,000 feet, and cannot fly faster than 120 knots, or approximately 140 miles per hour.)