Like I said above … it’s not pessimism … it’s realism, Dean.
Companies that “engineer a pretty good product” that customers clamor for at a price that the marketplace can absorb and justify are usually successful. Schedule slips, onerous purchase / maintenance / resale rules, crashes by both experienced and inexperienced pilots, poor capitalization of the Company, and more do not a successful Company make. “Engineering” goes a lot further than just designing a usable product. And as far as pure engineering is concerned … seems to me they’ve had hull issues. How is THAT a good product?
In the heyday of GA, there were SO many C172’s sitting on airports in Kansas that they couldn’t find space or enough ferry pilots to move them. At that time, you could buy one for less than $50K. My 1975 C172 cost $21K new. Now that the price is ~$400K, they take delight in announcing unit sales (once in a while, larger flight school sales). Price is a seminal ingredient of a successful engineering effort; $389K for an Icon that may or may not be subsequently maintainable because the Company isn’t around … ain’t it. When Cessna brought it’s 'concept" LSA to Airventure 2006, people went crazy. When they brought the Skycatcher to Airventure 2007 and priced it at $109.5K, people were disappointed but bought it in droves because – well – it was a Cessna. And THEN reality set in. And all of that was from a large well capitalized Company. In the end … the bulldozers finished them off.
In many ways, Icon is similar to the early days of Jim Bede and his BD-1. Jim was a pretty decent designer in Ohio but had no real management ability to produce or market his BD-1 which morphed into the AA-1 “Yankee” built by the American Aviation Company. Even that missed the mark and had to morph again into the AA-1A Trainer. In the end, he had to be removed so the Company could prosper. Then he went on to huckster his BD-5 which took the same path. I view Icon the same way. The Icon A5 may well be OK … I dunno … have no interest in it and haven’t flown it. But the people running the Company are doing it with OPM and doing a bad job of that, too. As Glen T aptly points out, the glitzy black Icon booth with dancing girls and multi-media videos and blaring sound systems was noticeably absent at Airventure 2019. In and as of itself, THAT is telling.
And then we’re gonna “save the planet” if only hoardes of Icons flying in 3 dimensions comes to pass. Give me/us a break. I have it on “expert” authority that the planet only has 12 years left so … what’s the point? But the 1,500 private jets flying heavy hitters into Davos to talk about “climate change” are likely flying above 10,000’ so … it’s OK … no impact on the planet. Geesh!