Cirrus SR20

You know, we have... pretty long history of aviation right the company started back in the 80s right so we've been like designing and building planes since the 80s the SR 20 first came to market in 99 right so we've got a lot of experience flying planes building planes delivering planes and a lot of feedback right we've got over 11,000 SR series airplanes out there flown by a whole wide array of different people.

But we pretty early on started getting experience with people learning how to fly in the plane and flight schools using the SR20 or the SR22 or even sometimes the SR22T as the platform for their training experience and and we took all that feedback right like what people liked what people didn't like the complaints that we got um you know we looked at the competitive marketplace whatever what are our competitors doing right um you know what do people like what do people not like and um we kind of just like put it all together um there's a lot of passionate people at cirrus um really who are i know it's shocking um but like who are really keen to like To just get more people to come and do what we do and fly planes and make planes as a part of their life.

But a big part of that, it's not just the pilots, right? It's the people running the flight schools.

It's the people running the V&M shops.

That experience was formative.

It shaped a question that would drive the company for the next decade: what if you could build the safety net into the airplane itself? When Cirrus certified the SR20 in the late 1990s, CAPS came with it, not as an optional add-on, not as a retrofit, as a fundamental part of what the airplane is.

Here’s how it works.

Mounted in the rear of the aircraft in a compartment behind the cockpit is a solid fuel rocket and a large ballistic parachute.

the airframe parachute.

Cirrus aircraft builds their whole line, the SR-20, the SR-22, with something called CAPS, the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System.

It's a rocket-deployed parachute built into the top of the fuselage, and when you pull the red handle over your head, that rocket drags a canopy out the back and lowers the entire airplane, you included, to the ground under silk.

For years, there was a real cultural fight about that handle.