Early 80s – Paul Martyn is a young man in love with skydiving, and completely broke. He starts to make log books, jump suits, and other gear – anything to fund his jumping. Along the way he picks up a nickname – JYRO for ‘Jump Your Ring Out’. No one really calls him Paul ever again.

Jyro starts to make skydiving parachutes under the name “Icarus by JYRO” The first canopies were a few Pegasus copies for friends, then Jyro began gradually elevating the performance levels of the designs of the day.

In the early 90s Jyro changed the brand name to “Icarus Canopies” – and in ‘94 NZ Aerosports became an incorporated company.

In the late 80s PD brought out the Excalibur canopy showcasing a brand new construction method – the tri-brace (now ubiquitously known as ‘crossbraced’). Jyro knew that this was a big step forward, and wanted to combine this with another exciting new piece of technology – ZP fabric. Many, many prototypes followed, but while they flew hotter than ever, the openings weren’t good enough for the market. Jyro and the team just about went crazy and broke trying to make it work, but then…..

NZ Aerosports released the Mk 1 Icarus EXTreme in 1995, the first ZP crossbraced canopy on the market, and high performance canopies changed forever. In 1997, the upgraded FX (Fucking eXtreme) was released featuring the closed nose seen on all HP canopies these days. 2 Years later the PD Velocity was released based on the same format – the industry leader Jyro took inspiration from was now looking to him! Because he was a cheeky bastard, Jyro released the first crossbraced 9 cell – the VX – on the very same day.

In 1999 NZ Aerosports was growing in notoriety, and demand quickly outstripped Jyro and his small team’s capacity. In response, he signed licensing agreements with CIMSA in Spain, and Precision in the US – more people than ever were now able to jump Icarus Canopies! Precision later left and came out with their own versions of these designs.

After that there were upgrades and performance enhancements to our range, and Jyro developed and released the JFX and JVX, pushing the existing crossbraced designs even further. There hadn’t been anything groundbreaking for a while however…

In 2010, a young French skydiver with an aerospace engineer’s degree came to NZ for a holiday, visited the factory and – as happens more often than not – left with a job making linesets. It didn’t take long for Jyro to realise who he had, and Julien never made another lineset. Between Julien’s technical knowledge and high tech computational design processes, and Jyro’s passion for design and uncanny intuition for canopy characteristics, the infamous ‘Summer of Love’ prototyping fest was embarked on. This culminated in a wing leagues better than anything else being made at the time – Petra. Petra still holds all major Canopy Piloting records – fending off newer entrants to the ‘hyper performance’ market.

Following many years of dissatisfaction with the working agreement, an inability to collect royalties owed but not paid, and failed negotiations – in 2016 NZ Aerosports cancelled CIMSA’s licence to make, sell, or market Icarus canopies. NZ Aerosports is now the only place manufacturing true Icarus canopies. Of course, breakups often get messy, and CIMSA refused to drop the Icarus name, and released a new range of canopies with names that sound an awfully lot like Safire and Crossfire (we’re sure it’s unintentional). Cheeky bastards. Oh well!

Shortly after the 2017 PIA Symposium, Jyro passed away. It’s been incredibly hard on us as a company and individually – most of us considered him a close personal friend. We’re buoyed by the fact that he left a legacy of canopy design that’s worked its way throughout the market, and will last for a very very long time. Our job is to continue on in his footsteps and honour his legacy.                                                                                                  Our mission statement is still JYRO’s:                                                                                                                  DON’T KILL ANYBODY.                                                                                                                                        STAY OUT OF THE SHIT.                                                                                                                                      HAVE A PHAT TIME.                                                                                                                                            MAKE SOME MONEY.                                                                                                                                 CONQUER THE WORLD.

After Jyro passed away, the company was handed to Luci, his daughter. The new shareholders are now Luci, Attila, Richie, and Julien. We work well as a team and continue to work towards Jyro’s vision and values,  with adding our own spices to the mix.