Cirrus Aircraft's Vision SF50 personal jet program has made significant progress toward certification, and is still on schedule for first deliveries in late 2015.
The next steps in the program involve building conforming aircraft for further certification testing and preparing the Cirrus headquarters in Duluth and its manufacturing facility in Grand Forks for production.
"This is an exciting time for the Cirrus Vision," said Dale Klapmeier, CEO and co-founder of Cirrus Aircraft. "The program continues to progress forward on schedule as we move into building our conforming aircraft. We are taking delivery of some outstanding equipment that will enable us to move into the production phase of the certification process."
The first verification vehicle, V1, which first flew in July 2008, has been fulfilling its purpose to verify the design of the aircraft and answer specific questions about performance and design. The data generated from V1 was used to finalise the aerodynamic shape. The configuration was frozen in 2010.
In 2014, Cirrus will introduce the next flight test vehicle, the company's first conforming jet (C0). This aircraft will be built and inspected to production drawings and built using production tooling and processes.
The primary use of the C0 will be performance verification, flying qualities certification and production tooling and process development. The next assembled flight article will be C1. It will be used mainly for aircraft systems development and certification plus refinement of production components and assembly planning.
The final flying article will be C2. This aircraft will enter the flight test program in the latter stages of certification and will reflect, as close as possible, the first production configuration aircraft in both equipment and manufacturing processes.
Cirrus recently took delivery of production equipment including fuselage molds, production robots and an autoclave.