World’s first personal jet almost ready

by philg

Cirrus has flown its first production jet (Avweb). Certification and customer delivers “by the end of June” (notice that they don’t say June of which year!).

This is kind of exciting, though folks might point out similarities to the 1954 Paris Jet, which typically sells for around $200,000 (one for sale right now). Sourpusses might also point out that a used very light twin-engine jet can be purchased for around the same $2 million price.

Kudos to the Chinese owners of Cirrus for pushing this out the door. I do think that it will be sufficiently simpler to fly than a twin-engine jet (which consumes $30,000 of sim training every year per pilot, for example, plus $40,000 per year of hangar at the higher-end airports) that it will shake up the market. There presumably won’t be a revolution in the single-engine market until someone figures out how to make a much cheaper turbine engine, ideally with lower horsepower and better fuel economy. A $2 million Cirrus is not a replacement for Caitlyn Jenner’s 1978 Bonanza.

4 thoughts on “World’s first personal jet almost ready”

  1. A 50+ year old jet with steam gauges wouldn’t be comparable, but according to the wiki, in 2009 JetSet International Ltd purchased more than 30 MS760s from the French and Argentinian governments, and …. are refurbishing the airframes and installing new jet engines and avionics and selling them for approximately $550,000.

    Back in the ’60s, Chrysler was working on small turboshaft engines for automobiles and they built a number of prototypes that they gave to consumers as test cars. They ended up not going forward mostly for reasons of fuel economy because a turbine engine uses a lot of fuel at idle and lower rpm vs a piston engine. This should not be a problem in aircraft which spend most of their time at constant rpm. Nitrous oxides were also a problem but with modern urea injection could be overcome. The design of the combustion chamber and single stage turbine were crude by modern standards but I think they were aiming to make the thing cheap enough to be mass produced. Too bad that it never went into production because it could have been a source of cheap turbine engines the way people put Subaru engines into homebuilts.

  2. Once the SF50 becomes available, who would ever buy a Piper Meridan? Especially the new Meridan M600 priced at $2.8M?

  3. George C:

    Fuel burn, maintenance cost (because it’s a single turboprop, you can just annual it, no need to be on a program), hot and high performance, training costs and time, runway requirements (especially important in mountains, with one way airports like Aspen that often covered in ice and tailwind limited). I can keep on going…

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