General Aviation Cover Story

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GENERAL AVIATION COVER STORY 20 APRIL 2015 AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY OFFERS SAFE AIRPLANES, BEAUTIFUL LINES, AND FAST SAILING SHIPSCirrus has one of the safest aircraf and flying records in the industry. Its accident rate today is 35 percent less than the GA average safety record and its fatal accident rate is 55 percent less. By Charles Chandler ast July at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh we ducked into the Cirrus Aircraft pavilion to dodge one of the deluges that seem to plague the show. Looking at these airplanes sitting outside in the rain reminded me that much of our aviation terminology and jargon can be traced back to our naval heritage and culture. The perception was that if a ship had beautiful lines and looked fast it usually was. It would be easy to imagine that back in 1984 the Cirrus Aircraft founders Alan and Dale Klapmeier were thinking about safety, comfort, and fast sailing ships as they designed their first homebuilt VK-30 kit aircraft in the basement of their family’s barn in rural Baraboo, WI. The VK-30 was a sleek, fast, and “cool” aircraft that launched the Cirrus Aircraft Company. We wanted to talk to the experts about the com- pany’s history, the unique CAPS system, why com- posite airplanes, and the new SF50 single-engine jet, so Cirrus Marketing Communication Manager, Megan Timm arranged an interview with some of the senior staff. President and COO Pat Waddick who has been with Cirrus for 27 years provided a brief overview of the general aviation (GA) industry in the ‘70s and ’80s and why brothers Alan and Dale Klapmeier chose to develop composite home-built aircraft. According to Waddick, “After peak sales in the ‘70s and ‘80s production dropped significantly because GA aircraft designs had become stale, with little innovation and few reasons for potential custom- ers to buy a new GA aircraft. At the same time the homebuilders were taking advantage of composites, better avionics, and innovative designs to produce very attractive, more efficient, comfortable, and safer aircraft that was a better value proposition for those GA customers.” www.AviationPros.com | www.AMTSociety.org 21 EARLY CAPS testing in 1998 over the California desert near the Salton Sea. Below a U.S. Air Force Academy Cirrus. CIRRUS AIRCRAFT In the mid-1980s the Klapmeiers entered the market with the VK-30 kit, a sleek, fast, five-place pusher aircraft followed in the ’90s by the ST50 powered by the PT6-135 engine. After some success with the VK-30 and ST50 they needed to expand the business footprint and moved the company first to the Baraboo Airport and then to their pres- ent facilities in Duluth, MN, and Grand Forks, ND. INDUSTRY MILESTONES Ten years later they dropped those models and developed the Cirrus SR20. This aircraft was a sig- nificant GA industry milestone with automotive styling, better ergonomics, avionics with digital dis- plays, fixed gear as fast as comparable retractable gear, built-in cabin roll bars, air bag seat belts for both pilot and co-pilots, and the LATCH child seat restraint system. The SR series is the only aircraft equipped with Cirrus’ proudest industry contri- bution — the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), a ballistic parachute that can be deployed from the back of the aircraft in emergencies that allows the entire airplane to descend safely. To date 105 lives have been saved with this system and with the SR series fitted with the CAPS systems and Cirrus’ pilot training programs, “We have one of the safest aircraft and flying records in the industry. Our accident rate today is 35 per- cent less than the GA average safety record and our fatal accident rate is 55 percent less,” Waddick says. Cirrus provides formal CAPS training for both pilots and partners in command where you get assigned a factory instructor and two hours in the flight training device practicing multiple deployments of CAPS. Tim Timmerman, director of engineering, dis- cusses some technical and maintenance details for GENERAL AVIATION 22 APRIL 2015 AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY CAPS. “We have an annual visual inspection to see if everything is in place and that there has not been any water intrusion. There is a solid rocket motor with a chemical compound that has been reacting since the day it was made and we want to ensure that the rocket has enough energy to deploy the parachute. At the 10-year interval the rocket is replaced and the chute is sent back to the factory where it is inspected and repacked. On occasion we do get pilots who have deployed the chute drop by or call to tell us how much they appreciate having CAPS on board.” Cirrus has more than 50 authorized service centers worldwide qualified to service and perform the 10-year overhaul for the CAPS system. Paul Brey, senior vice president of product develop- ment, highlights the advantages of using composite materials rather than metal in aircraft manufacturing. “With composites you can literally change a design feature and test it the next day and then tool up for production inexpensively and quickly. “There are other obvious and important production and maintenance reasons to use composites. Our SR series aircraft have only 23 parts in the fuselage and about 40 in the wing which helps us do most of our inspections visually without expensive NDT mate- rials and equipment, and minimum paint removal. The composite structures are extremely durable and resistant to damage caused by towing, jacking, and stone or bird strikes. “Strikes from huge birds like vultures will often only crack the skin, where a metal aircraft would have considerable damage. Other great reasons for using composites are there is no corrosion and very few fasteners on our aircraft. The SR series have been very crash worthy and helped the pilots and passen- gers survive.” “As for our industry, collecting and analyzing large amounts of data is probably going to be the future of GA. We need this data to do predictive maintenance and