My take is that this situation is of Icon's making to a larger degree than Cirrrus. The problem lies with the marketing, who they're selling to, and exactly *what* they are selling. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with the Icon A5 aircraft itself. Both have been focusing their marketing efforts on people who are not currently pilots, trying to attract them to flying, but there's a huge difference. Fundamentally, Cirrus is selling an airplane, something that you get in and fly to other places, transportation. Fun transportation, but at the end of the day, Cirrus wasn't selling anything much different conceptually, than a Cessna 172 (If you are firing up the keyboard right now to quibble about performance or avionics, my point has just gone sailing waaaayyy over your head) By contrast, Icon is selling a Jet Ski with wings. This has been clear right from the beginning, before the first prototypes were flying. The Icon founder was pretty explicit about this in the interviews he gave the various aviation rags. He was very clear that he was doing something completely different than the usual approach of selling airplanes to people who were pilots, or who already had an interest in aviation. He was targeting the Jet Ski crowd, not pilots. His plane was going to be designed, and styled and marketed not to people who want to fly from one point to another, but to people who want to bomb around the lake at low level, thrilling their girlfriends and chasing their buddies in their ski-boats. If there's any doubt about that, you only have to watch their marketing videos, they are filled with footage of low level flying over the water, flying next to ski boats, flying over guys slaloming on Jet Skis, flying low near canyon walls, etc. It is very clear that what Icon is selling is low level fun and thrills close to the water.
So, yeah, it's something less than astonishing that with a total 6 (Or is it 7?) customer aircraft delivered there have been 2 fatal accidents both of which involved low level flight around bodies of water as a major contributing factor.