Piston single pilots who dream of flying a jet.

They would have bought anything Cirrus made, so why not give them a better one for the same money, and a lot sooner?

And then many more folks outside the Cirrus ecosphere would be buying them, too, and that's how jets become cheaper, make more of them.

Mike C.

Absolutely.

Textron has a reference point for size, speed, power, use cases, features, etc. When you ask the market, you get far better answers to "what would you change in a PC-12?" rather than the vague "what do you want in an SETP?". And there's tons of little engineering things, like Textron knows about the bad stall behavior of the PC-12 so they can account for that from the start instead of needing a stick pusher.

A living, breathing successful example makes the next guy's job WAY easier.

The first guy has to cut down the forest in their way, the next guy merely has to avoid the stumps.

Mike C.

So the SF50 saves 10 minutes over an SR for 5 times the cost to fly, plus yearly recurrent training and check rides.

Net result: SR pilot spends less time doing the same missions when training time is included.

The SF50 has never been about being practical, it was about how to jam a jet engine onto an SR and make it fly somehow.

Mike C.

Socata and pilatus came to market with slightly different takes on the 'pressurized, fast SETP' and had to cut some regulatory underbrush to do so. 23 years later, through ups and downs in the aircraft market they are still selling. Sometimes a market doesn't exist until you make the product that creates it.

There's a fallacy in assuming average is typical.

For example, a jet is used in training and does 10 landings in 2 hours. It now has to fly 8 legs at 2 hours each to reach the 1 hour average. So that was 2 hours of use in training, and then 16 hours of longish legs. Despite the 1 hour average leg length, that certainly isn't a lot of "1 hour" trips given that 89% of the hours occur on 2 hour legs.

There are times that short flights happen, like for training, or for repo on charter/frax, or maintenance. Then it takes a lot of "real" hours in flight to push the average up leg length up to 1 hour.

For a jet that averages 1 hour per cycle, the majority of time it flies will be spent on legs longer than 1 hour.

Also, 1 hour in a real jet is a long way, typically 100 nm further than the SF50 will go in an hour.

Mike C.

Cirrus already makes that plane, the SR22.

In the "too much work" category, include the type rating and recurrent training for the SF50 so that you can get turboprop performance from a jet.

"Single engine jet" is not "easy". That's the root fallacy behind the entire program.

Mike C.

Already 600 hours on it.

well pretty much any airplane with any number of engines is cheaper than an F-35

that seems like as relevant an argument as many being made on this thread anymore

Eclipse EA500 hit the market at a price point cheaper than the SF-50.

This is true even when correcting for inflation.

Mike C.

A la VCR recorder?
Or SE Jet?

And they both go through the forest slow and have to travel the same distance.

Hire a company that does stump removal.

Chip-

A la VCR recorder?
Or SE Jet?

Great! I’m sure Cessna loves this, as they just got the certificate on their new 11-passenger 3500-mile “Longitude.”

(Oh, of course you can buy TEN (10) SF50’s for the cost of ONE Longitude.)

Did you take a demo ride Luc? Thought you were a possible buyer at one point?[/quote]

Not yet.
Want, yes.
Can afford, not yet.

Absolutely.

Textron has a reference point for size, speed, power, use cases, features, etc. When you ask the market, you get far better answers to "what would you change in a PC-12?" rather than the vague "what do you want in an SETP?". And there's tons of little engineering things, like Textron knows about the bad stall behavior of the PC-12 so they can account for that from the start instead of needing a stick pusher.

A living, breathing successful example makes the next guy's job WAY easier.

The first guy has to cut down the forest in their way, the next guy merely has to avoid the stumps.

Mike C.