Throughout the last 30 years of my aviation career, there has been one constant in this ever-changing industry – Cirrus. No matter how hard Beech, Cessna, Piper, or Mooney tried to battle the up-and-comer from Duluth, those Minnesotans just kept winning. The naysayers, me being one, for many years discounted the design choice that made every Cirrus a Cirrus: the parachute. My thought always was that unless you’re flying at night over mountainous terrain, why would you want to drift down uncontrolled under a canopy in an engine-out scenario? And that always begged the question: Why would I want to fly single-engine at night over mountains? But what I, and every other person trying to sell a competitive product against Cirrus, realized pretty quickly is that none of the naysaying really matters. The product, the marketing, the company’s attention to detail, and the focus on listening to its customers just beat out the competition year after year. And slowly but surely, the players in the high-performance single-engine piston market keep dwindling.
Hats off to Cirrus for having a vision (no pun intended) and sticking to it. Innovation is an oft-overused word in aviation manufacturing, but Cirrus might be its definition. The physics of flight haven’t changed, but Cirrus innovated by seeing what the market needed – a system. What is the system? Personal connection > community >
coolness > training > performance > peace of mind.
This month, Rich Pickett gives us a peek into the latest innovator in the Cirrus lineup. Its Vision Jet G3 is an engineering marvel, satisfying its customers’ desires while creating an experience no other manufacturer has duplicated. Cheers, Cirrus.
