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If all goes as planned, the first Cirrus SF50 jet will be delivered in Q4 this year, capping one

of the longest development programs in General Aviation history. Years before its official

unveiling in 2007, Cirrus Aircraft founders Alan and Dale Klapmeier were talking about The

Jet, as the project had come to be called, the moniker suggesting the institutional manifest

destiny the brothers saw in the aircraft.

Alan promised it would be “the slowest, lowest and cheapest” jet available, emphasizing that “the single

most important criterion will be the ease of operation,” while Dale stressed that “instead of taking the cor-

porate airplane and making it smaller, we’re going to build the airplane that our customers want, powered

with a jet engine instead of a propeller.”

The Klapmeiers’ vision of a “personal” jet translated into a 300-knot, five-place aircraft with a service

ceiling under 30,000 feet, that offered the reliability of a turbine combined with single-engine economy.

And it would incorporate the fail-safe parachute system and new glass-panel technology that helped drive

the success of the SR20 and SR22. It’s not that the Klapmeiers concept was novel, with The Jet potentially

rubbing wingtips on a ramp of the future with the proposed Diamond D-Jet, PiperJet, Eclipse 400, Epic

Victory Jet, Excel-Jet Sport Jet and the ATG Javelin, among other wanna-fly single-engine jet programs.

THE CIRRUS VISION SF50

Vision SF50

FIRSTLOOK

THE ERA OF THE ‘PERSONAL’ JET FINALLY ARRIVES

By James Wynbrandt

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Against this backdrop, by the end of 2006, half a year before its introduction (and without showing any design renderings), Cirrus was taking $100,000 deposits on The Jet and send-ing each depositor a jigsaw picture puzzle of the proposed aircraft, one piece at a time. “We can confirm it has a windshield and wings,” Alan quipped in the spring of ‘07, with the company sitting on some $15 million in refundable deposits. Depositors got their first view of the aircraft on June 27, 2007, at the annual Cirrus Migration customer homecoming at company headquarters in Duluth, Minn., where The Jet was unveiled the following day. The airframe’s bulbous cabin area, top-mounted engine and the V-tail empen-nage were the most striking design details. Mike Van Staagen, vice president of advanced development and The Jet’s primary architect, stressed its minivan-style flexibility. “Mountain bikes, camping equipment, golf clubs, skis, bigger families, antique spinning wheel? No problem,” he told the “migrants,” citing the aircraft’s “cavernous interior” and “very diverse usage” as strong selling points. After its first flight a week later (July 3), The Jet received a rapturous welcome at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh that same month. Indeed, it was a small-jet infatuated world, with the Eclipse 500, Citation Mustang, Phenom 100 and HondaJet promising – or threat-

ening, depending on your point of view – to darken the skies with the thousands of VLJs, as one commentator forecast. The 2008 financial meltdown and its asteroid-like impact on General Aviation dashed all those rosy dreams. The prototype and cabin mockup of The Jet – renamed the Vision SJ50 that year and the Vision SF50 in March ’09 - were dutifully displayed at trade and air shows. (SF50: Single Fan; “50” is a loose metric of capability measured against that of the VK-30, the pusher kit aircraft that launched Cirrus, and the same numbering convention used in naming the SR-20 series). But Cirrus was making more news for corporate turmoil than jet development, as its majority owner, Bahrain-based investment firm Arcapita, sought management chang-es. In August 2009, Alan Klapmeier left the company, and by the following summer he was waging a public but unsuccessful campaign to buy the seemingly moribund jet program from Cirrus. In January 2010 Brent Wouters, who had replaced Klapmeier as CEO, announced Cirrus had abandoned the SF50’s development and delivery schedule, due to lack of funding. But hopeful customers kept the faith,

with more than 400 leaving their $100,000 refundable deposits in Cirrus’s keep-

ing. After Cirrus’s purchase in 2011 by China Aviation Industry General Aircraft, the new owners undertook

a comprehensive financial review of

the program. In 2012, Cirrus announced the resumption of development and plans eventually to produce the SF50. Perhaps the “go” call was prompted by the relatively advanced state of the SF50’s development. The prototype, used to justify the aerodynamic case for the jet as well as in initial flight tests, needed little design modification to become the blueprint for the conforming test articles. “We were very pleased minimal changes” were needed, said Ben Kowalski, the company’s v-p, marketing. “Where we typically tweak, we were dead-on the first time.” Among the few noticeable changes: A cab-in door on the right side of the prototype has been eliminated, replaced by an egress hatch (a weight-saving measure), and the con-forming aircraft’s belly is larger, its nose more pointed, and the tail’s sweep less pronounced. Additionally, the angle of the tail fins’ V has increased to 90 degrees, while the angle of the engine mounting atop the fuselage, a place-ment selected for ease of maintenance and load balancing, was modified to a 20-degree pitch, together enhancing the aircraft’s con-trollability and response to power changes. But the Williams International FJ33 engine occupies the spot from which the Cirrus Aircraft Parachute System is deployed in the company’s SR series. The SF50’s chute will be housed in the nose of the aircraft, and if deployed, straps embed-

Vision SF50

FIRSTLOOK

Vision SF50

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ded within the composite airframe will tear through the skin to hold the aircraft in an upright position during descent. After a year of preparation, Cirrus aimed to get the three conforming airplanes they needed — C0, C1, and C2 — in the air by the end of 2014. They accomplished that with the maiden flight of C2 last December. C0 has been used primarily for aerodynamic perfor-mance and handling testing. C1 and C2 have now accumulated more than 250 flying hours and completed about a quarter of mandated flight tests, thanks to the “remarkably effi-cient” process of using telemetry to download data (and teams of flight test engineers to analyze it) in real time, according to Kowalski. C2 is the conforming production model, and designers are now refining the interior, after finalizing the design from windshield to the A Pillar, denoting the back of the first row of seats, an automotive term the company has borrowed along with several of Detroit’s best practices. “We sculpted the interior with clay, as they do in the auto industry, to see its shape exactly, and make sure the experience [of flying in the SF50] will be what we want it to be,” Kowalski said. “We then scan the clay [with lasers] to make the tools” to manufacture the parts. Cirrus will build 90 percent of the inte-rior components in-house, including the SF50’s seats, perhaps the most important interior furnishing from a comfort per-spective, an item that many OEMs contract to specialty-seating manufacturers. That’s what Cirrus had planned to do. “We quickly learned we knew more than anybody we could outsource to” when it came to creating the seats Cirrus wanted,

Kowalski said. “We feel pretty passionate about the type of experience we want our clients to have.“ For access to that experience, it’s a simple airstep up into the cabin, the door forward of the left wing. With the pilot’s seat pushed forward, there’s room to load both big peo-ple and that proverbial antique spinning wheel. In standard configuration, the SF50 seats two passengers forward and three in the second row. The middle second row seat can slide well aft of the seats on either side, giving all three back seaters more el-bow room. A third row can accommodate two children. Several additional seating configuration options are available. Up front, dual sidesticks and rudder pedals allow control from either side, but the instrument panel is centered in front of the left seat, underscoring the message that this jet doesn’t need two pilots to fly, and that if you’ve managed to find your way to the front left seat, you don’t have to share the fun. The company has been working with Garmin to adapt its Cirrus Perspective avionics suite, which Kowalski called, “a huge part of the user experience in the current product line” to the SF50’s G3000 system. Standard equipment will include a ground-operable vapor-cycle air condition-ing system, dual WAAS GPS, active traffic system, XM Radio with audio and datalink weather, ADL and SD card data recording, and three-axis digital autopilot. The choice of add-ons includes weather radar, EVS, TCAS, ski tube, satellite phone and a lava-tory, in addition to “a whole wide variety of interior options, paint and customization,” Kowalski added.

The basic skill level needed to operate The Jet safely is instrument proficiency. As with its SR pistons, Cirrus has developed an in-house program, delivered at the headquarters, augmented by online training programs for systems operations, for transition training. The company will also provide a type rating for the turbine aircraft and train a cadre of Cirrus Standardized Instructor Pilots to ensure train-ing in the field is also available. The SF50’s base price is $1.96 million, while options can bring the price up to $2.5 million. Cirrus currently has more than 550 orders in hand, and the production line is ramping up now. Plans call for producing 90 SF50s in 2016, 125 in 2017 “and continuing on from there,” said Kowalski. And so it is that the long awaited triumph of this modest turbine may finally come to pass. Whether or not the personal jet will transform aviation, as so many hoped, sure-ly it will alter the lives of its lucky owners. “A personal jet is about more than power,” Alan Klapmeier said at The Jet’s introduc-tion. “It’s about empowering our customers to live the dream of the jet lifestyle.”

CIRRUS VISION SF50

Performance (sea level, standard conditions.)

Takeoff: 1,615 feetTakeoff over 50-foot obstacle: 2,128 feetClimb rate: Not published Max operating altitude: FL280Stall speed with flaps: Mid 60sMax cruise speed: 300 KTASLanding groundroll: 1,245 feetEngine: Williams International FJ33Pounds thrust: 1,800

Dimensions

Wingspan: 38 feet 4 inches/11.70 metersLength: 30.9 feet/9.42 metersHeight: 10.5 feet/3.20 metersCabin width: 5.1 feet/1.56 metersCabin height: 4.1 feet/1.24 meters For more information, contact Cirrus Worldwide Headquarters4515 Taylor Circle Duluth, MN, 55811Toll Free: 800.279.4322 http://cirrusaircraft.com/vision/

All specifications are based on manufacturer’s calcu-lations. All performance figures are based on stan-dard day, standard atmosphere, sea level, maximum weight conditions unless otherwise noted.

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