Before I touched down at 2oceansvibe, I wasn’t much into jets and all that aviation stuff.

Then Seth took us on a flight around the peninsula in a Piper Warrior, right out past Cape Point and back over Camps Bay and the CBD, and the penny dropped – damn, being a pilot is pretty damn sweet.

This is a Piper Warrior and no, that isn’t Seth behind the wheel.

Good times.

As a private pilot Seth is particularly excited about the new Cirrus SF50 Vision Jet, though, which is pictured in flight at the top of the page, and he isn’t alone on that front.

The team at Plane and Pilot Mag are also chomping at the bit, claiming the ‘personal jet’ has zero direct competition.

I’ll let them take the controls:

…at a price of $1.96 million (R25 million), the air gets even more rarified. 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…

When it comes to designing a single-engine jet, there are a number of engineering challenges that one can best describe as treacherous.

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.

The ceiling also eliminates the need for the manufacturer and owners to get RVSM approval, which is a difficult task.

They review every little nook and cranny of the jet, so we’re not going to put you through all of that, but we will skip ahead to the end:

…the success of the jet made a lot of sense to me. Here you have a 300-knot jet with economy and comfort that rival or surpass some turboprops while offering an ease of operation comparable to some high-performance piston singles…

Cirrus has disrupted the aircraft manufacturing industry. Today, there’s a sub-$2 million option for proficient pilots of high-performance singles and twins to move into the world of flying their own single-engine jet. And after my flight, I saw that it did, indeed, make a lot sense. Again, my one-word note on the subject applies. “Wow.”

Rustle up a cool R25 million and you can have your own personal jet – not too shabby.

Also, we’re up for another flight whenever you are, boss.

[source:planeandpilot]