Icon Starts Customer Deliveries

Icon has started to deliver airplanes to customers and let them "take them home and fly them wherever they want," the company said in its annual newsletter, issued on Tuesday. The first deliveries, completed in June and July, went to owners in Seattle, Montana and California. To support these A5s out in the field, Icon said it has trained authorized maintainers at the home airports of the delivered aircraft. "We are continuing to grow the third-party partner network to service upcoming deliveries that aren't near factory service centers, currently in Vacaville and Tampa," Icon said. The company also said it has trained more than 125 pilots at its first two Icon Flight Centers, located in Tampa and Northern California.

The company also reported that it has completed 21 aircraft at its production facility in Mexico, refining their quality standards in the process. They trained more than 125 pilots and logged about 5,600 flying hours on the flight training fleet, resulting in design and manufacturing changes that have been incorporated into a revised Model Year 2018 A5. The changes include improved nosegear that makes it easier to steer the aircraft during taxi, better lighting and legibility for the instruments, stiffer rudder pedals, no airspeed limit for windows-out operation and improved access panels in the wings and fuselage. The company plans to ramp up production of the new model in the first half of next year.

AVweb's features editor Rick Durden flew the airplane last year and reported on it for our sister publication, Aviation Consumer. You can read his report here.