Icon Aircraft announced last week that it has successfully closed another round of equity financing to support the development of the Icon A5 amphibious LSA. The new cash will take the project through the rest of its flight-test program and will also finance engineering and manufacturing studies, the company said. Icon CEO Kirk Hawkins said the company already has orders for more than 400 copies of the airplane, totaling more than $40 million in sales.
Icon also announced that it is pushing out its production start date by nine months, with first customer deliveries now scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2011. This change was due to the crisis in the global capital markets beginning last fall, the company said. “While the changes in the capital markets did affect our production start date, the current economic climate has minimal impact on Icon overall,” Hawkins said, noting that the backlog of sales should carry the company forward into a new economic cycle. The prototype has been flying since last summer, but its first public demo flight is scheduled for EAA AirVenture later this month. The A5 will fly in to Oshkosh Monday morning, July 27, and on Friday morning, July 31, it will fly at the nearby seaplane base.
