Are you guys all ready for takeoff? Yeah?
Yeah, it's up to you. Do you want to take the takeoff? I can walk you through it.
Yeah, so what we'll do is, as soon as we get to take the runway, we'll bring the throttle all the way up to the takeoff position. You're going to feel a little stop. You want to push past that, and that's our takeoff thrust. But then we'll be about 85 knots or so, and then we'll just kind of slowly put some back pressure on the stick, and off we go.
All right. You ready? You can bring the thrust to full.
Perfect. You got takeoff thrust.
Takeoff thrust.
Welcome back to Jay Leno's Garage for this episode. Something completely different: the Cirrus Vision Jet. This is an amazing aircraft. Single engine.
Well, let me explain. I've had a little bit of experience with jet engines. I've got my motorcycle, the Y2K, which has the C18 out of a Bell Ranger helicopter. We built the EcoJet. We used a Honeywell LT101 big jet engine.
That's a road car. And we have the Chrysler Turbine Car, which was built in the early '60s. Sam Williams was one of the guys involved in that. His son now runs Williams Turbines out of Detroit, and they built the engine for this. So it's a kind of connection between my turbine car and this.
I've had a lot of experience with turbines on the ground, never flown one in the air, and that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to fly this plane. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you know, this Cirrus is a pretty amazing aircraft. Revolutionary, at least to somebody like me. I'm a ground guy. I just didn't pay a lot of attention.
And a while back, six, eight months ago, I guess it was, Cirrus came in with the prop plane, and it had the parachute feature. Should the pilot become incapacitated, the plane can land itself. It can communicate with the tower. I mean, it's just amazing, amazing technology.
And this is their latest aircraft here. Let's bring in a gentleman who knows well, way more than me: Matt Bergwall. Matt, come on in. Now, what is your official title at Cirrus?
Jay, I'm the executive director of the Vision Jet product line at Cirrus Aircraft. So my main job is to bring new products to market.
And this is an amazing product. You know, jet planes are always eight, nine, ten million dollars. This is less than a Bugatti Chiron, isn't it? That's about 5.2, and this is what? About three and a half?
3.6 million dollars for a fully loaded Generation 3 Vision Jet.
Okay. And it has all the safety features. It's got the parachute deal, right? And I was stunned to learn that something like 320 people have been saved.
Yes, there has. Yeah, with our SR series airplane and then our Vision Jet, we've had over 300 people who have been returned to their families because of that technology.
Yeah, I mean, what it does is it will either land the plane. Let's say you're in a plane and a pilot has a heart attack, as a passenger, and we did this with the prop plane, you hit a button, it immediately finds the nearest airport. It communicates with the tower, keeps you, the passenger. If you're sitting in this thing by yourself and the pilot's dead, what do you do now? You know, and it's pretty cool.
And we took off and we landed the plane without me touching a thing. And it was pretty amazing. And that was a prop plane. This is a jet, and it has all the same features.
Yeah, all the same features. It has the Cirrus airframe parachute. It actually comes out of the nose of the jet versus the tail on the end of the SR.
It does. Comes out this way. The airplane still kind of comes and floats gently down to the ground, though.
In fact, that Vision Jet's about 6,000 lb. That parachute is about 6,000 sq ft. In order when that actually does inflate and you kind of come under canopy, so it's quite a, you know, quite a bit of area.
How much did you say this plane weighs?
So this is 1,500 lb heavier than a Tesla?
But now, you see, I would have guessed 10,000 lb. I don't know why. But it's carbon fiber, right?
And carbon fiber can meet all the stringent... Obviously it can, out of aluminum. And how many people are building carbon fiber planes? Is this a common material now, or are you guys the only ones doing it?
Um, it's not that common. So, I mean, Cirrus does specialize in kind of using composites for kind of all their airplanes, you know, whether it's the SR or carbon fiber here for the Vision Jet.
Um, well, what's pretty unique about the carbon fiber is you're able to actually shape the airplane. And you can tell right now it's like an egg shape in the cabin. And the whole reason for that shape is to optimize the passenger and pilot experience in the airplane. So you have shoulder room where you want shoulder room, you have head room where you want head room. And it's just kind of a little bit of a deviation from the traditional airplanes, which are usually more of a tube.
I just can't get over how light it is. I mean, just this much of anything seems like it would be 10. If this was an aluminum plane, which is the most common material, right? What would it weigh?
Um, you will see similar weights as well. And then the biggest thing there you get is just you're not able to shape it like you want to. And the thing is, the airplanes have to be light for defying the laws of gravity every day. So, you know, weight's very important.
And if you wondered how we got it in here, well, you just pop these, the wings come on, right? And...
For this particular airplane, yes. Yes, this is our mock-up that we bring to...
The wings don't detach on the...
Not on the current Vision.
Not on the current... Okay, I got it. So that just shows what I know. I was going to say that seems like it'd be a little dicey. Yeah, hey, wait a minute. Yeah. Pretty... And how many people does this seat?
Uh, it fits six adults and up to seven people.
Oh, very cool. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And what is the range of something like this?
Um, you get about a thousand miles or so, and it really just depends how many people you have. And it's, I mean, it's a great regional travel airplane.
New York to Chicago, that kind of thing.
At least not for non-stop. I mean, we got here in two stops coming from Knoxville, Tennessee, and we're here in, you know, a little less than seven hours.
Oh, okay. Oh, well, that's pretty amazing. And what is the equivalent horsepower of a single engine like this? Is it measured in horsepower?
Um, so we have about, it's 1,846 lbs of thrust that comes out of this Williams FJ33 engine, which is actually the smallest engine that's in general aviation right now for jet engines.
I mean, a lot of times I'll fly a Lear 450, and that just... I mean, it's just a fire hose hooked up to the gas pump. I mean, it's, oh my god. Does this get pretty good mileage?
It does. So when you get up to altitude, you'll be sipping about 60 gallons per hour, which is very...
It's a very small number in terms of jet engines.
My motorcycle with the C18 Allison, that drinks 8 gallons a month.
Yeah, so with... I mean, you say you're sitting in LA traffic for a half hour of your hour. You got... That's just not very economical at all.
This is terrible. A horrible thing that is. It's very good. All right, so very cool. What else? Show us some other features. What else do we have here?
The thing that sticks out the most is probably the V-tail.
In the back. I mean, that is the most unique thing when you see this airplane on the ramp. The second thing that's pretty unique is the fact that it's just a single engine.
So it's a little easier to operate.
The costs are a fraction of what most jet airplanes are.
And I'm always stunned at the number of small aircraft accidents. It's always the same thing: a pilot had a stroke or got disoriented or something happened, and the people are just...
I, you know, I remember talking to a friend of mine about who has the most crashes, and he says, 'Doctors.' Because you get on the plane. Now, doctor, you know, I'm a doctor. I think I know what I'm doing. Uh, okay.
Now, I want to show... I'm a doctor. I think I... Okay. Now, that seems to... that's sort of the joke that goes around. So if you're flying with your doctor friend and he passes out, we will do this on the plane. You just hit the button overhead, and it's taken out of your hands.
Yeah, we have Safe Return that's standard on all our Vision Jets. So if anything happens to the pilot at all, it's accessible to pretty much any passenger that's in the airplane. All they have to do is press this red button, and the airplane will take care of itself.
Is this the best use of AI ever in history? It seems to me like that. It is AI, isn't it?
Um, it's not necessarily AI, but at the same time, I mean, it's still some pretty, you know, powerful technology that is able to...
But I just hear people kind of trash this technology a lot. Oh, we're going to lose this. Yeah, you'll lose some jobs, but you also have amazing... I mean, it literally saves your life. I mean, your family, if you're flying your family somewhere on vacation and you have a heart attack, you're in a plane, everybody's gone. I mean, I find it just to be amazing.
And I didn't realize how many planes you had equipped with this. I thought it was a few hundred. So what, 11,000, 12,000 planes you've done?
Yeah, so we have, like Cirrus, we have about 11,000 of our SR series airplanes flying around the world, and the jet, we have about 750 jets flying around the world right now, and we've been the best-selling jet in general aviation for about the last eight years.
Oh, that's great. Now, tell me about carbon fiber. And when you're in the aircraft, is carbon fiber a better insulator against outside noise, and aluminum, is it noisier? I know like in some carbon fiber cars that are all carbon fiber, you hear every rock chip bouncing off the inner wheel well, you know, that kind of thing. Any advantages or disadvantages over aluminum there, or is it just better in every way?
A lot of it's actually in the pressure vessel itself. So we're able to actually come out with one piece that is where you pressurize in the airplane. So coming from right here to kind of right where the engine starts. So that is just one piece. So that actually helps quite a bit with the pressurization of the airplane, where you don't have various amount of seams or whatnot in the airplane.
It's not all riveted together, is it? So against aluminum, stronger, equal, about the same?
They both have their pros and cons. I mean, we decided to do kind of carbon fiber because that's one of the things we do specialize in. And then again, the biggest thing is we can shape the cabin to optimize that experience because we can just kind of mold it to...
Because I know aircraft is so careful about every piece of fabric has to be fireproof and all that. So it's a real sort of feather in the cap of the carbon fiber industry that, oh, it works for this. You know, because you think, now we build them aluminum, blah, blah, blah, you know. So, and I imagine it must be a lot more cost effective than thousands of little rivets along here, isn't it?
It's actually funny, you go to our factories, and most of the time you go to airplane factories, you usually have to wear ear things because of, you know, there's rivets, rivets. Here we have one little section that's all they do is, you know, do some rivets for, you know, a few of the pieces of the airplane.
Yeah. So like when you're watching a car show on TV, they always have the guy standing next to the grinder doing his spot. He's not doing anything. Just shooting sparks. You have to have that guy. Well, I just find that amazing technology because it just... I don't know what the rate of sort of progress is in the airline industry.
You know, it seemed like it's pretty static for a while. Planes have not changed a whole lot since the '70s. I mean, it's still six and a half hours or whatever it is to New York City from LA, and almost the same plane. Probably more fuel efficient and a little safer, probably. But overall, I mean, this is a huge leap. I mean, to get carbon fiber certified, it must have how many years of testing? And you know what I'm saying? It's just crazy.
Yeah, so I mean, our Vision Jet program, we started the design phase in the early 2000s.
We were starting with actually flying prototypes right about 2008. And then we had to take a little bit of a breather just because of the financial crisis.
It actually gave our engineers a bunch of time just to kind of go through and take a lot of the risk out of our program. But when it's all said and done, we were starting to really get into certification kind of starting in about 2011, '12, and we were certified in 2016 with our first delivery shortly after.
And, but yeah, it's a big thing for the carbon fiber. You know, the planes have to go through a bunch of structural tests, stress tests, and just kind of making sure, you know, it will withstand the rigors of a flight.
Now, can a new pilot go from not being a pilot to a jet, or do you have to come up through the prop plane?
Well, usually come up from the prop plane. The best thing about Cirrus, we have a solution. So if you do have, you know, you can go into our SR series airplane, you can learn how to fly, you can get the hours, and get the proper ratings. It's the most important thing. And then you can kind of come up into the jet, you know, after as low as, you know, 3, 4, 500 hours.
Yeah, I mean, it just seems odd now. We have automobiles that are more expensive than airplanes. It doesn't compute. I mean, the Bugatti is almost $2 million more than this. And you get there a lot faster in this. Well, it's pretty cool. Well, are we ready to go for a spin on this thing?
Yeah, let's go for a flight.
Let's... Hey Mom, I'm going to fly a plane.
Quick go over with you guys, just a few safety things on the airplane. There are two exits. One is right here as our emergency exit. You can pull, rotate, and this thing comes out. It's like a plug. And there's that door that we came in on. There's a little knob you got to press, and then the handle can rotate up, and that would open up.
Otherwise, if any... I don't feel good, something happens to me, you guys know what to do. Red button.
Yeah, hit the red button.
And otherwise, any questions?
If anything goes wrong, just hit me. This airplane actually has something a little different, too, than we've ever had before. It's called a CPDLC data link.
Where you can actually log on and get all your clearances directly from ATC. It's like text messaging with the air traffic.
All righty, I got something. And this is our clearance. There we go. We just got our route. So normally ATC would have to actually sit there and tell you all the stuff, and you hope you actually can get it right. Here, I was just able to get it right kind of via text message. Makes it a lot easier from the pilot's perspective. All righty, you guys all ready to go?
Here we go.
Are you guys all ready to take off?
Ready. Ready. And it's up to you. Do you want to take the takeoff? I can walk you through it.
Yeah, walk me through it.
Yeah, so what we'll do is, as soon as we take the runway, we'll bring the throttle all the way up to the takeoff position. You're going to feel a little stop. You want to push past that, and that's our takeoff thrust. But then we'll be about 85 knots or so, and then we'll just kind of slowly put some back pressure on the stick, and off we go.
All right, ready. You can bring the thrust to full.
All the way forward.
Perfect. You got takeoff thrust.
Here we are. We got 60 knots, 70, 80 knots. Start to pull back.
There you go.
Off we go.
Just like my motorcycle, except I'm on the ground.
A little bounce. And then we'll turn right to 213.
Now we just put the autopilot on and kind of sit back and enjoy. One of the things you notice about the airplane is just the big windows.
