The Icarus & Daedalus Project...

 
In 1988 Bill Coe of performance designs designed the Crossbrace Tricell canopy the Excalibur. At the time Parachutes de France had released the Blue Trac, the first ZP Elliptical canopy available on the market. These were the most significant steps main canopies had seen for a long time and started people swooping their landings and we've never looked back. Since then several other canopies came out lifting the bar a little each time. Notably the Sabre, the Jonathon, then in 1993 the Stiletto the most popular sport main of all time.

NZ Aerosports had been building canopies since 1985 starting with making a few Pegasus copies for friends then slowly trying to get more performance out of the designs of the day. We always had a passion for high performance canopies and after the Excalibur and Bluetrack came out an obvious move seemed to be a ZP XBTricell. We built a couple, the performance was amazing, but the openings were totally unworkable. We headed off in other directions for several years trying to get more performance out of conventional canopies we could make open well enough to sell on the market, PD eventually pulled the
f-111 Excalibur off the market for similar reasons.

In 1994 we realized we were not getting very far with our tinkering around.
The most significant performance gain was the Tricell canopy we had built in 1989. Elliptical ZP canopies were the norm in HP now and we had just installed one of the first computer cutting systems in the industry. We had our own software written to generate the shapes we needed and built the best ZP Elliptical Crossbraced Tricell canopy we had ever jumped. It was hard to make and bulky but we new we were miles ahead of anyone else in our game.

NZ Aerosports has only ever been a very small business. We had this awesome canopy but it still wasn't opening well enough and we thought we could get even more out of it. The next 2 years many had sleepless nights, any idea we could think of to manage the openings and optimize the performance from it we tried. We did a run of wind tunnel tests and just about went crazy building more prototypes than we could afford knowing we had a winner if we could just figure it out.

In 1995 We released the Mk1 Icarus EXTreme, Since then this style of canopy has revolutionized our sport. Canopy flying competitions were starting out and our extra performance showed up clearly in these controlled and measured environments. Soon we were licensing our design to other manufacturers. In
1997 we released an up graded version called the FX which had a smaller pack volume and the closed in nose universally seen today. in 1999 the giant in the industry PD the original designers of the crossbrace released the Velocity based on the same format we had developed in the FX. This really made people take notice of us, the well deserved industry leader was following our lead. The same day we released the VX-27cell.

You learn a lot designing High Performance wings. much of what we had learned was transferred into a complete range of canopies The Tandem, Omega, Safire, Crossfire as well as the FX and VX. These canopies were to be manufactured and sold under license by Precision in the US and Cimsa in Spain as well as directly by ourselves. After some time Precision left the group and came out with their own versions of these designs. the canopies became mostly manufactured in Spain for both the US and EU markets.

Our designs have always progressed and clearly been ahead of the field from
1995 till today. Currently the VX holds the world record at 435 feet flown by JC Colclasure, further than any canopy has swooped before. Our canopy design software has come a long way also, our cutting systems are now used by most ram air canopy manufacturers.

Now here's the exciting part... We haven't been idle over the last 5 years, we will be releasing our latest canopy called the JVX in January 2005. Recently in the second competition it has ever flown, the JVX took first place at the 2004 US Nationals flown by Jim Slaton.

The JVX will only be available from NZ Aerosports in New Zealand and sold directly to the canopy pilot. We're hoping people in the HP game have been around long enough to find us at www.nzaerosports.com. We might be on the other side of the world but nowadays we're only a Phone call, e-mail and a FedEx away. We have support centers in both the US and EU.

The HP canopy market is a very small segment of the market but still plenty big for us, at Aerosports it has always been our passion, we want to focus our business more on that. This will give us more opportunity to take things further in the future as well... Watch this space.

The rest of the Icarus range is still available as normal both from us and built under license through your dealer.