Icon was targeting thiis very type of buyer, interested in the "exhilaration" of flying the "apex product" in the jet ski world, while not having to worry about "the usual metrics of speed, range, payload, altitude, and complex cockpits?" "Utility be damned."
Again, Icon's now deleted marketing article from their website.
Kirk Hawkins [CEO and founder of startup ICON Aircraft] knew the mission was risky. So like any commander trained by the military, he readied his troops for the potential hostile forces they faced. “Before we launched, I briefed our team to be prepared,” Kirk, a former F-16 pilot, recounts. “I said, ‘Look, this industry has seen acts like this before. Just be prepared for some aggressive criticism.” “Aggressive criticism” may not equal the hazards Kirk confronted during his Air Force or airline flying careers. But the flak could have compromised the bold rescue operation Kirk set for his team: reviving general aviation with a new paradigm of recreational flying and a product they believed could fulfill that promise...
“ICON’s mission is not so much about transportation,” Kirk told the crowd. “It’s not about the usual metrics of speed, range, payload, altitude, and complex cockpits. It’s about getting you out there and interacting with your world.”
Kirk explained that ICON’s goal was to create a product that delivered the pure joy and exhilaration of flying, an experience that had been lost as airplanes became utilitarian tools. So rather than compete with other aircraft, the A5 was designed to compete in the world of powersports, to be the apex product in the realm of ATVs, motorcycles, watercraft, snowmobiles, and the like. Utility be damned.
As Steen Strand, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer puts it, “No one goes to buy a jet ski and says, ‘I want to buy a jet ski, and I need it to get over to there.’ They get a jet ski because they want to have fun.”
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...tion_April_2010.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
