![]() With its fine specific fuel efficiency numbers, the jet gets good range even in the 20s, where turbofans are less efficient than turboprops and where the air is slightly thicker, allowing slower true airspeeds. The 1,800-pound thrust Williams powerplant is also, well, sized just right for the Cirrus jet. The Williams FJ-33 hugs the top of the fuselage and creates very little pitching moment when power is applied or reduced. So, in this case, the introduction of a new engine didn’t come with the same degree of risk as it might otherwise have carried with it. It’s safe to say that many of the potential problems for the FJ-33 were discovered and solved decades ago on the larger engine. Its single engine, a Williams FJ-33, is a smaller version of the hugely popular FJ-44, which debuted on the CitationJet in the early ’90s and which has racked up an impressive record of reliability and performance. It’s also important to remember the SF50 isn’t a particularly powerful jet. The ceiling also eliminates the need for the manufacturer and owners to get RVSM approval, which is a difficult task. The Cirrus brain trust, in fact, designed several of those problems out from the get-go, giving the jet a ceiling of 28,000 feet, the same as single-engine turboprops, which routinely fly in the mid- to-high 20s, where a pressurization failure, while still an emergency of the first order, isn’t nearly as potentially lethal as such a failure would be in the high 30s. When it comes to designing a single-engine jet, there are a number of engineering challenges that one can best describe as treacherous. Courtesy of Cirrus Aircraft Singular Challenges It was a rocky road getting there, a subject about which I could devote a long article, but the bottom line is, they succeed. Over the intervening years, the company went through struggles related to the economy and to bringing a jet to market. I was up in Duluth, Minnesota, the then-home of Cirrus Design, not yet Cirrus Aircraft, when the company launched the jet with a full-sized mockup. ![]() It’s been a kind of sport to beat up on the SF50’s performance numbers, but that takes performance in a vacuum, removed from the very real issues of purchase price and direct operating costs, not to mention the very real and more difficult to quantify quality-of-life issues. ![]() ![]() The airplanes that are competitive in terms of price aren’t as fast or can’t go as far, or both, and the would-be competitors that can match or beat its performance cost a lot more. And at a price of $1.96 million, the air gets even more rarified. Part of this is because, well, the SF50, for which Cirrus earned type approval late last year and production approval, impressively, just a few months later, is the only single-engine jet. There’s no airplane that’s a direct competitor, only ones that are possible alternatives. It’s an apt metaphor for the remarkably successful Cirrus Jet, a single-engine, 300-knot 5-7-seat personal jet, that exists in a space all its own. Here in the 20s, not only were we by ourselves-the airliners thousands of feet above us and the pistons thousands below-but we were also apparently the only ones enjoying a smooth ride. Just like the light, we were, as they say, golden, with pilots in other planes at altitudes both below us and above squawking nonstop about the rough rides they were suffering. Up where we were, it was smooth, cruising along at Flight Level 270, Utah’s Painted Desert, swaths of reds, browns and golds panning behind us as we flew.
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