Ultimate Flying Machine Two L.A. entrepreneurs have dreamed up the perfect plane for the weekend aviator.
By Jennifer Wang •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Meet your new lust object: Icon Aircraft's A5, a stealthy little airplane that can take off and land on water, retract its wings like a diving sea hawk and log screen time in two major movies, even though it's a more than a year away from rolling off the assembly line.
The A5 is the creation of Kirk Hawkins and Steen Strand, two Stanford University grads who decided to design the perfect plane for a new class of aviator: the sport pilot. Five years ago, the Federal Aviation Administration made it easier for people to fly when it designated a "sport" license--anyone with a couple of weeks and $3,500 to spare can get the certification. And the A5, a groundbreaking aircraft, aims to inspire everyone to do just that.
Hawkins is an engineer with a deep flying background (think Air Force F-16s, American Airlines 767s, you name it), and Strand is the inventor of Freebord, a skateboard-snowboard hybrid, and a former engineer with glam design firm Ideo. They call the A5 a blend of "badass" Apple and BMW product design, powered by engineering courtesy of the rocket scientists they wooed away from Burt Rutan's famed aerospace firm, Scaled Composites.
