You can park it on the driveway. Take it for a 300-mile spin. And fill it up at a corner gas station.

And, oh yes, it can soar 15,000 feet and land on a lake. Or by parachute, if necessary.

We have yet to see life as conceived in “The Jetsons,” but if a Marina del Rey startup is successful, that day could be coming.

Icon Aircraft is one of two dozen companies nationwide developing a type of plane called a “light sport aircraft” aimed at making flying far more accessible, though for recreation not transportation.

Its first product, dubbed the Icon A5, bridges the gap between a traditional aircraft and tiny ultralights, which carry only the pilot and travel shorter distances.

The A5 carries two, can take off on an airstrip shorter than a football field and can be flown after just 20 hours of flight training half the time required for a traditional private pilot’s license.

And though the A5 lists for $139,000 the cost of an exotic sports car that’s still cheaper than a new single-engine aircraft, which run roughly $150,000.

“It could revolutionize aviation,” said Dan Johnson, president of the Light Aircraft Manufacturers Association in St. Paul, Minn. “It’s designed to get people to think about flying who would have never thought about it before.”

The A5 received a flurry of publicity last summer after the company unveiled a prototype. Since then it has completed 46 test flights and the company hopes to receive Federal Aviation Administration approval next year.

Icon said it has received 300 orders for the plane totaling $40 million, but the first delivery date has been pushed back to the middle of next year as the company has struggled to complete a third round of fundraising.

Still, in an era where pushing it to the limit is all the rage, Icon has generated big excitement. Indeed, company executives said they are designing and marketing the A5 not just toward existing pilots, but to extreme sports aficionados, sport car collectors and baby boomers looking for a new hobby.

“The whole point of the A5 is to show how anyone on the street who has wondered what flying feels like can get a shot at it without needing a whole lot of training or money,” said Kirk Hawkins, 42, founder of Icon Aircraft and a former commercial airline and F-16 pilot. “Light sport aircraft is going to be one of the hottest recreational activities in the future once people find out about it.”

Dramatic debut

The Federal Aviation Administration approved the new class of “light sport aircraft” just five years ago to better regulate light experimental aircraft, which were being developed by garage mechanics and were outside the jurisdiction of the agency.

Currently there are 24 manufacturers in the United States developing 32 different aircraft. So far, 2,000 light sport pilot licenses have been issued by the FAA.

“It’s the biggest change in aviation in the last 50 years,” said Les Dorr, an FAA spokesman. “A key idea was to make it possible for more individuals to experience sport and recreational aviation in a manner that is not overly burdensome, but still safe.”

When not undergoing test flights in the Mojave Desert, the sleek and shiny gray-painted Icon A5 is housed at the company’s 6,000-square-foot facility in Marina del Rey.

The aircraft resembles a canopied jet ski with wings that span 34 feet but can be folded back when the plane is not in use or being transported. The plane’s seven-foot-tall and 22-foot-long body checks in at roughly 950 pounds.

The cockpit interior has two seats, removable windows to feel the breeze and its control panel resembles a sports car more than a traditional airplane. The instrument panel has three large circular gauges that track the plane’s airspeed, altitude and fuel simplicity that was intended.

“Planes usually have all those control devices because pilots need to land both at day and night and in all kinds of weather conditions and that can be intimidating,” Hawkins said. “The A5 only has what you need to fly for recreation in good weather and only in the daytime.”

Powered by a 100-horsepower engine with its propeller located behind the cockpit, the plane can reach speeds up to 120 miles per hour and get about 17 miles per gallon, filled either with unleaded automobile gasoline or aviation gas.

Hawkins, who’s been fascinated with flight since his childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut, got the idea for the plane while working on his M.B.A. at Stanford in 2004. He had returned to school after a career as a commercial jet pilot and came across an article about how the FAA was on the verge of creating the light sport aircraft category.

“It just seemed to be the right opportunity at the right time,” he said. “I found something that I thought could be a special innovation that was going to establish a new market.”

With the help of professors and other aviation experts, Hawkins pitched the idea of Icon to a few Silicon Valley investors, gaining the support of Internet entrepreneur Esther Dyson and JetBlue Airways Chairman Joel Peterson.

Then in 2005, Hawkins recruited Steen Strand, an investment banker who had invented the Freebord, a new generation of skateboard, to help oversee the design. The two had met years before at Stanford when both were getting their master’s degrees, Strand in product design and Hawkins in engineering.

In 2006, the company moved from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles in order to be closer to the aerospace research industry and car design studios. They ended up recruiting designers and engineers from BMW AG, Rolls Royce PLC and Nissan Motor Corp. to aid in the A5’s development.

“This is where the heart of innovative product design is for anything having to do with transportation or aviation,” Hawkins said. “The talent here is the best pool we know of.”

After making some partial and smaller scale models, the company dispatched a team of four engineers and four fabricators to Icon’s engineering facility in Tehachapi to construct the final pieces of the full-scale prototype aircraft, which garnered a bevy of international media coverage when it was shown at a press conference last June.

Taking flight

The aircraft took its first flight a few weeks later in July off of Lake Isabella in Kern Valley; it was up in the air for about 10 minutes before successfully landing on water. Since then, the A5 has conducted 46 flight tests that company officials say have been successful. The aircraft will go through several more testing phases before the design is finalized. After flight testing, a preproduction model will be built to verify the plane meets all federal and industry compliance standards.

The aircraft has continued to generate excitement. It will be featured in the upcoming “Iron Man 2.” And it is scheduled to have its first public flight demonstration at the upcoming Oshkosh Air Show in Oshkosh, Wis., later this month, considered the world’s largest gathering of general aviation enthusiasts.

One question that has not been decided: where the plane will be manufactured. Although the company is now headquartered near other aerospace companies in the South Bay and is being tested in the Southern California desert, Hawkins said the company may manufacture it elsewhere.

“We’d love to stay in Southern California, but it’s expensive to manufacture here and we’re getting courted by other states,” he said. “We are looking at consolidating the headquarters, testing and manufacturing facilities into one place next year but not sure where yet.”