Never lacking for an opinion, Klapmeier discusses Cirrus' next airplane and GA's future
During an August visit to AOPA headquarter in Frederick, Maryland, Alan Klapmeier, president and chief executive officer of Cirrus Design, spent about two hours with AOPA Pilot Editor in Chief Tom Haines, sharing his thoughts on how the company's Cirrus SR20 and SR22 airplanes fit into general aviation and providing an update of where the company is now and where it is going. During the exclusive interview he provided some hints on what might be next from the young company that has gone from building no airplanes a decade ago challenging the venerable Cessna Aircraft for bragging rights to being the largest producer of piston-powered aircraft.
This is an edited version of the interview. For the complete transcript and video highlights, see AOPA Online ( www.aopa.org/members/klapmeier-interview/).
Watch a 27-minute video of the interview (broadband recommended).
Tom Haines: Give us a quick update on the status of Cirrus Design.
Alan Klapmeier: The quick update would be that in June of this year we delivered the 2,000th production airplane. We're building 12 airplanes per week. So that must put us up around 2,100 [deliveries] or so now. It's actually kind of fun when the number grows fast enough that you don't pay attention to the numbers anymore. We're going to try to do 13 a week, 14 a week, 15 a week, up until we hit 16 a week. And all of those kinds of changes require changes in planning, in production flow and inventory control, so they're fun. We'll hurdle through it, I guess.
Haines: At what point do you think you will be at 16 a week?
Klapmeier: We would hope we would be at 16 a week at the end of the year, although I suppose more accurately the way I should say it is we will have the capability to produce 16 a week by the end of the year, and then it will depend upon sales.
Haines: And what's your sales backlog at this point?
Klapmeier: The backlog is 250 airplanes, something like that. Obviously that ends up being a shorter and shorter duration as we increase capability. And one of the other, bigger variables that we are seeing is fleet activity. So now you start to get people who come to you and say, "I want to buy 25 airplanes or 50 airplanes or 75 airplanes." And you look at them and go, "Well, we just can't do that." There is no large open block where we can build a fleet. So we're going to start seeing a little more variation in production as we start to allow for those kinds of fleet conversations, and then it will come down to do we win the contract or not. And they're very, very competitive, so I don't expect that we will win a lot of them right away.
[In late September, Cirrus announced that it had won a fleet order of 130 aircraft from Western Michigan University.]
Haines: Can you describe the SR24?
Klapmeier: (Jokingly laughs) No. The business plan always had an SR24 in it...and it would be a retractable gear airplane. We've since concluded that there will not be an SR24-with-retractable-gear version of the current airplane. It just doesn't make sense. The cost, the complexity, the weight, the minimal speed improvements, the insurance, maintenance.... All these things just don't argue in favor of trying to do a retractable. One of the other things we've learned is that the systems necessary to track FAA certification, production, and conformity, and all of those kinds of things for the future are so complex, and I say this to the distress of our engineering department only half jokingly, that we could certify a new airplane as easily as we could certify a new cup holder because 90 percent of the paperwork you have to do for the cup holder as well.
We think in terms of future products going down two paths. The first is continued improvements to the existing airplane. Obviously, then we would have the second path, which is the next new platform, whatever and whenever that would be. And we debate whether or not we should announce that sooner rather than later.
Haines: But is that a likely announcement this year?
Klapmeier: No. It's a possible announcement this year.
Haines: Can you give any engine insights? Is it a jet or a turboprop? Is it a diesel?
Klapmeier: We look at all of those things and I have a very strong opinion of what the next airplane is. We are not at a stage on the project yet where we have to make that decision. Well, maybe I shouldn't say that. I think we are because in my mind I've already made the decision. As you know there's Dale also [Alan's brother and co-founder of the company]. And Dale still has different thoughts about it. But we've got enough decided that we are pretty close to the final decision on all those kinds of questions. There's a number of things you could do that would involve turboprops, turbofans, or big diesels and still accomplish most of what we are trying to in this next airplane, which would obviously be bigger, higher performance, more capability than the existing airplane. But most important, retaining all the features and the user-friendliness of the current airplane. The stated goal of the next airframe is that you ought to be able to go from an SR22 to that airplane with nothing in between and satisfy the insurance companies. Whatever kind of transition training or type rating required would be a simple process.
Haines: So, if you were going to build a jet and join the VLJ [very light jet] crowd, what would the Cirrus jet be like?
Klapmeier: We will not be joining the VLJ crowd.
Haines: Or if you were going to build a personal jet?
Klapmeier: Now that's a lot closer to what we'd be doing.
Haines: Can you describe what it would be like? A single engine?
Klapmeier: An SR22 with a jet engine on it.
Haines: I'm having trouble envisioning that.
Klapmeier: Really? Or an SR22 with a turboprop or an SR22 with a big diesel, with a little bit more performance and a bigger cabin.
I've been in the front of [Cessna] Citations a couple of times and there isn't anything about it that makes me say, "Gee, I wish I could do this on a regular basis." But it also wouldn't be the kind of airplane that you could transition from an SR22 into without any other kind of training. If we do a jet it won't be anything like that. That's why we won't be joining the VLJ class of airplanes, because it's not our market, it's not our customers. It's not something that we understand. I think one of the advantages we've always had as a company is that we all fly little airplanes and so when we say the airplane needs to do this, what we are really saying is, "I fly it and it needs to do this."
Haines: Cirrus focused a lot this summer on safety enhancements on the 22. Can you describe some of those?
Klapmeier: We've always focused on safety enhancements from the very beginning. What we've added this summer as standard equipment is the TAWS [terrain awareness warning system], or more accurately Honeywell's enhanced ground proximity warning system. There were a number of reasons we decided to do it. But certainly the driving reason is that, of the fatal accidents we've had, more than half were CFIT [controlled flight into terrain]. And the Honeywell TAWS really is pretty compelling stuff. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that we don't think that these accidents would have happened if they had had TAWS. Now that can't be said as an absolute.
Haines: And you've added air bags.
Klapmeier: We've actually been looking at air bags inside since the beginning. I think the first place I ever saw it was in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics. When we designed the SR20, one of the reasons for the side stick was in order to have an air bag, and it was envisioned as being mounted on the panel, deploying automobile-style towards the occupants. And so obviously you needed to have the controls out of the way in order to have that happen. When we saw the seat-belt ones we said yes, that makes a lot of sense and we ought to have it. To me it's another level of safety that will help prevent fatalities or injuries in accidents. There's no silver bullet there. It's certainly not as important as handling qualities in terms of just preventing the accidents. But I think that someday there will be lives saved because of air bags.
The crashworthiness of the airplane is great already in terms of the FAA requirements that concern structural-strength and head-impact criteria. And also just from the way we designed it with this cocoon idea. We had one accident down in North Carolina where the end results were that the wings were broken off, the tail was broken off, the engine mount forward and the firewall were broken off. And what was left was the cabin, and the occupants walked away. You look at the picture and you can't imagine how people would walk away from it. It's pretty good stuff.
Haines: Because of your emphasis on safety and being so innovative with CAPS [Cirrus Airframe Parachute System — the whole-airplane parachute system], whenever a Cirrus crashes it makes the news. And as a result, when it makes the news everybody reads about it. When a [Cessna] 182 or a Mooney or something else crashes it doesn't necessarily make the news and some perceive perhaps that there are a greater number of Cirrus accidents. Does that seem unfair to you?
Klapmeier: It obviously seems very unfair to us and drives us crazy. It's very frustrating for all the emphasis we put into safety. We obviously want to see better results. We are never satisfied with the accident statistics we have. Any accident is one too many, but accidents are going to happen. So it is frustrating to get what we see as misunderstood coverage of the accidents. Obviously the parachute is something that is very highly visible and very interesting to both pilots and nonpilots. And so people obviously want to read about that. It's "was the parachute used?" Or if it wasn't used, could it have been used, and all the associated speculation. We think we've done a lot of innovative things about safety, we think that they are proven both in testing as well as common sense, but we consider them widely misunderstood. An example is stall-spin characteristics. Stall-spin accidents have been relatively high up the list of fatal accidents for general aviation. They typically happen at low altitude in the pattern. They happen at a time when a trained pilot could not recover the airplane, and pilots aren't trained to recover airplanes. So when people talk about spin recovery, they have a basic misunderstanding of the facts that surround most of these incidents, and of the capability of pilots to do something about it. And yet we get constant criticism about whether our airplane has gone through FAA spin training. The fact of the matter is we looked at the statistics, made a conscious choice during the design certification of the airplane to say we can save more lives if we prevent the stall-spin event from happening than if we allow it to happen and teach people how to recover from it. If the airplane can't recover in the altitude available, then it doesn't matter if you have shown the FAA that the airplane can recover.
So our approach was to prevent the accident from happening. We went to the FAA and said we want the [equivalent level of safety — an alternate means of complying with FAA certification criteria] for our improved stall characteristics. In addition to the improved stall characteristics we wanted them to include the parachute as an equivalent level of safety — in part because we already had it on there and in part we had demonstrated that the parachute could recover the airplane in less altitude loss in a spin than a pilot could recover the airplane through normal recovery techniques.
The FAA said, we agree, you're right, the parachute is a good idea and part of the equivalent level of safety. The frustrating thing for us is...we have people saying that the parachute was put on as an afterthought to fix something else. Well, it didn't happen that way. We decided to put the parachute on as a separate safety device before we thought about stall-spins.
We've taken lots of criticism about the parachute. And some pretty ridiculous statements have been made. I think we are now reaching the point where we will see other people adding the parachutes. I think the day will come when it's a common [feature]. And we will be very proud of the fact that we were able to help that revolution happen.
Haines: Cirrus was also the first light-aviation manufacturer to put in an EFIS [electronic flight information-system] glass cockpit.
Klapmeier: The AGATE [a NASA/industry partnership called Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments] programs that we were involved in, starting back in 1992, focused on what types of new technologies can be brought to general aviation that will help improve safety, improve performance, and grow the industry. A very wide artificial horizon was one of those features that would make an EFIS simple and intuitive, and in fact, I felt it was so important that I told them if the end result of AGATE was — the only thing they got done was — a simple, intuitive PFD [primary flight display], then the [AGATE] program was a success. If they got everything else they were trying to do done except an intuitive PFD, then the program was a failure. And there aren't that many times where you have features that are that critical to success or failure. And I think it is now proven to be true. You pretty much can't buy a new airplane where it isn't at least available. It's driving a lot of people to buying new airplanes. More important, although slower to be recognized, is that it will change the safety of general aviation. People will not have the same kinds of loss of control accidents if you have a large, simple, intuitive PFD. The classic example that is always used of those types of disorientation type accidents is John F. Kennedy Jr.
Haines: Do you believe that the results of AGATE, the PFDs that we have today, meet the simple, intuitive criteria?
Klapmeier: I wouldn't really say that that was the result of AGATE, but, yes, I think that the PFDs we have today do meet that...meaning the Avidyne [FlightMax] Entegra and the Garmin G1000. Now there's lots of additional features they have that I'm not satisfied with, that we spend a lot of time talking to companies about that are not sufficiently intuitive, but that's not about keeping the airplane upright.
Haines: Should there be an endorsement or some kind of sign-off to fly [in instrument conditions] with a glass cockpit?
Klapmeier: No. There should be some sort of endorsement...and it would be rare that I would suggest an FAA regulation...but there ought to be one for flying on six steam gauges. I do not think that someone who can fly instruments on steam gauges is going to have a particularly difficult time — difficult to the point of being dangerous with glass cockpits. Yes, there are lots of features, and they can get overwhelmed with those. But if the question is, I've got these six round gauges and now I'm going to look at a picture instead of six round gauges...can I do that? Then I would say the answer's yes! Can the reverse be done? No. I do not think that a person who learns to fly instruments in a glass cockpit is safe flying steam gauges. They're legal, but they're not safe.
Haines: OK. One more thing: What's the most important thing you've learned in the past 10 years since you announced the SR20?
Klapmeier: I have no idea. We've learned a lot, whether it's working with the FAA, or working with the industry, or working with customers. I mean, it's a huge long list of things we've learned. In terms of countless broad life's lessons, it's perseverance. Things don't always go right. And when we look back at the number of projects, changes to the airplane that we've tried and discarded along the way, it's a pretty big number of changes. Perseverance. Keep trying until you find a better answer.
Read the entire interview on AOPA Online, including Klapmeier's opinion on the future of general aviation, training for today's GA environment, and how the industry should be attracting new pilots.
E-mail the author at [email protected].
Links to additional information about Cirrus Design may be found on AOPA Online ( www.aopa.org/pilot/links.shtml).
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