I betcha my 62 Tbone gets a bigger crowd at every fuel stop.

I betcha my 62 Tbone gets a bigger crowd at every fuel stop.

A parachute that pops out of the airplane and floats a crippled plane to the ground where the occupants step out with nary a scratch.

Okay, I'll bite. Whole-airplane parachute as standard equipment on a new, type-certified aircraft. BRS says SR20 was the first and they ought to know.

So let me get this straight. If I give you $500 million, you can acquire suitable facilities, recruit a whole aviation manufacturing staff, design a clean sheet twin that will forever change aviation, AND have enough left over to be deemed a viable company that can stand behind its product?
Dang.
You are good.

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.

Was not the Cirrus a derivative from Ken Wheeler’s Express?

Innovating doesn't mean you have to be a patent holder. It takes a desire to improve something.

For example Cessna has had every opportunity to improve things and as soon as things got a little challenging they scraped it. Look at the Cessna NGP they brought to Osh in 2007, composite 3 door with a diesel engine. That would have been a complete game changer for the piston market and driven A LOT of sales. Instead, they punted. Look at the skywatcher, the diesel 182, etc. all things that could have stimulated sales, instead each one was scrapped. Now they are left with 172's as the vast majority of their piston market even though they are selling basically the same aircraft as they were in 1997.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYq7EVAzch8

Likely true, but unknown what the effect is on production costs.
Until GE, Pratt and/or Williams publish their prices; what is likely the most expensive component of the aircraft is unknown.

Tim

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.

Tim-

This is like arguing religion ie. pointless. I don't know why Mike hates Cirrus so much, maybe some guy in a Cirrus flipped him off one day when those MU-2 engines were screaming so loud no one on the ramp could hear themselves think, IDK.

Cirrus has a culture and track record of success, they have the formula. Properly capitalized I wouldn't be surprised to see them as #1 in the owner operator turbine segment in the next decade or two. The good news for that market segment is that a raising tide lifts all boats, so I expect other companies will be uping their game as well.

I think I know why Mike doesn’t like Cirrus. Mike has an engineering mindset. Cirrus is a marketing enterprise. The engineering circle and the marketing circle don’t overlap on the Venn diagram.

The engineers never want to stop tweaking things to put them into production, and normally don't understand or agree with the marketing and legal side. Of course, the accountants also have their say.
I had a client years ago what was the head of engineering at a line at GM. He said the biggest problem they had was getting the engineers to stop trying to teak things more so they could actually put cars into production.

As we used to say in software, "Shipping is also a feature"

There is a bumper sticker on the refridgerator at deer camp where I hunt in northern Wisconsin: "There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and begin"