Cirrus Plans To Certify Vision Jet by 2015

Cirrus chairman Dale Klapmeier said his company’s recent majority acquisition by China’s state-owned Avic will provide the necessary capital to restart the moribund SF50 single-engine jet program. He said the company needs time to re-ramp and re-staff the effort and that a new timetable for the jet is at least three to four months out. At press time, Cirrus had yet to provide Avic with a budget for the jet’s development or a specific capital request for it. “For the last three years we have been trying to figure out how to keep the SF50 program moving and how to spend as little money as possible,” he said. “We went from 150 engineers to 18 or 20 working on the program. We have to ramp back up and get 20 to 30 more engineers on staff and have all the plans in place to get them working productively. After that it is a three-year program.”