Find me $500M funding, and I will.

Mike C.

Find me $500M funding, and I will.

Mike C.

Mike - Ferrari is making an suv. It’s crippled on the track. People will line up for miles. Porsche sells more suvs than sports car. Cayenne off-road is good, it’s not amazing.

Why don’t you consider the eclipse crippled? Have you sat in one? The backseats are lame. Why is it better? It goes to 40k and only does 360 knots. Why not 400? For two engines that seems slow.

Every plane has trade offs. They are all crippled in some way. Vision is well executed user centered design. You are just not the user.

References?

They have been working on it for 15 years, it drained them so much they sold to the Chinese.

In any case, I think you'd need $500M to fund a startup company, design a plane, and setup production. You are not only building a jet, your are building a company at the same time.


Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the product.

The weird part is that making it a single cost Cirrus more development time and money than a twin. They got a low budget outcome from a bigger budget outlay.

Mike C.

Yeah, seems like a mistake to me.


It is, but not aerodynamically or due to having two engines. The Eclipse is crippled by the avionics, complex construction, and the lack of a viable company behind it. Cirrus basically has all those issues solved.

The Eclipse planform, twin tail mounted engines, is spot on, however. Eclipse's mission statement was to build the cheapest personal jet they could. They put two engines on it. If a single was going to be actually cheaper, why did they do that?


370 knots is pretty good for the fuel flow, much better specific range than the SF50.

Higher altitude has net speed advantages. More likely not to need to deviate for weather, for example.


The users are pilots stepping out of SR who want to hear whoosh instead of bang bang.

Many of them will be happy, at least initially, with that change. But they would have been happier with a twin and the performance it offers, and the plane would have appealed to a much larger market, not just SR folks.

The SF50 is the absolute best marketing tool for Textron, Embraer, Honda, etc. Now that you have flown a toy jet for while, here's some real ones you can buy. You can bet the list of SF50 owners is on every jet salesman's computer.

Mike C.

I don’t agree Mike. You have said before 300 knots is life changing. I keep looking at upgrades to the mu2 and I keep realizing unless it goes 400 all day every day, which few single pilot anything’s actually do, it’s not much of an upgrade.

600 hours in the mu2 flying around the entire country there have only been 2 flights where rsvm altitudes would have really changed my routing and saved more than 10 minutes. On one of those days the two pilot jets were steering around the system too. Not that I don’t deviate often, it just doesn’t add much to the trip times.

Vision will end up getting certified to at least fl310. At that level, it’s range will improve. I see it working out quite well for lots of people.

Two engines means two engine programs. That’s the killer imo on the Williams planes. The programs are great outside of cost.

I think there are lots and lots of pilots who the cost of the vision per mile will keep them from ever upgrading.

The single pilot jet upgrade path is really quite limited. They all have lots of compromises until you get to cj2 and up. I think there are a lot of people who the Vision fits the bill perfectly.

I don’t think you’ll ever see a single engine jet in the flight levels that insure you out of the weather. Once you start flying in the 40s you’ll think anything less is crippling. Bleed air is a very nice option. Is this how the SF tends to ice?

I think the above is valid. I have no data to back it up though other than the conversations I have had with a few SR22 owners. Their demographic seems different. I think tapping into this is great, however, on the other hand, I just don’t see the C marketing machine being able to keep a run rate in the hundreds of SFs per year. There is just not enough interest in aviation in the younger generations IMO.

With thunderstorms known to top 60,000 feet, no civilian jet will "insure[sic] you out of the weather". It would take at least a U-2 ... which is a single engine jet, BTW.

I often make the analogy the Mustang is yesterday's 421. Same type of comparison.

You just hit on what I believe might kill Cessna some day. Look at the piston line, a 2008 is almost exactly the same aircraft they are selling today. The only reason those are not the same as the 1997 is the G1000/GFC700 which Garmin has given some good options to match functionality on an older airframe.. Having flown all the SR-22 versions they did A LOT between each generation, especially the Gen V. I am sure that Cirrus will continue to offer meaningful upgrades with each SF50 generation and THAT will keep buyers excited and trading up.

What took the place of the Mustang in the Textron line up?

An M2. A very slightly warmed over CJ. That's the very definition of NOT innovating.

In 2017, the M2 outsold all other Textron single pilot jets.

The Mustang was the most innovative single pilot jet Cessna has ever produced. New cross section, new slightly swept wing, new windows, through the panel yoke, Garmin panel, etc. Hardly any carry over from the 500 or CJ series.

All that innovation didn't actually make the Mustang have along market lifetime, now Textron still sells CJ lineage that was started back int he 1990s, and has a lot of DNA that traces back to the Fanjet 500 from the 1970s.

So the "no innovation" = "market failure" is just wrong.

Mike C.

Let's look at 2017 GAMA data. 936 single engine piston aircraft sold, Cirrus had 355, Cessna had 238, Beechcraft 13, Piper 82, Mooney 7.

Cirrus has 38% of the market and number 1 in sales and dollar volume.

https://gama.aero/wp-content/uploads/20 ... 082018.pdf

Let's look at 2012 (oldest online data) 817 single engine piston aircraft sold Cessna 283, Cirrus 253, Piper 38, Beechcraft 12, Mooney 0.

Cirrus had 31% of the market

https://gama.aero/wp-content/uploads/20 ... 222017.pdf

What was Cirrus' market share in 1998? ..... ZERO

Going from nothing to number one in a very mature market in less than 20 years is an awesome achievement.

How else did this happen? OH, RIGHT, the idiot multi-millionaires that will buy anything they see in a magazine ad? The same ones lined up for the SF50 today I suppose.

No innovation=market failure by the numbers.

So they sold basically the same product for 20 years.

And now its #1 in the market.

Innovation not required.

Nothing on a SR is innovative. Its a fine expression of well known industry practices and vendor systems, but not innovation.

If you disagree, name something Cirrus invented on the SR series.

Mike C.

Myself and another pilot flew an SR22 from Dayton, OH to Portland, OR in 2004.
We had a crowd at every fuel stop.
They wanted to see the tv screen (just mfd then) in the panel, the parachute handle, and the smooth airframe. They were in awe.

Most of those people think Cirrus invented all of those things.