At risk of being that pilot at the dinner party who babbles on about airplanes while the guests gloss over from overload, it’s best to keep it surface level. But when someone asked if I had flown anything interesting recently of course I had to tell the story about the personal airplane that lands itself. After my five-minute spiel about how the new Cirrus SR models can put him back on the ground when his pilot can’t, he asked if the system will ever be in 747s. It sort of went off the rails from there.
What I should have explained, though, is something Cirrus’s SR-series product manager, Ivy McIver, reminded me of on the demo staged around White Plains in New York, and that’s the company’s focus on training every Cirrus pilot—not just ones who fork over $1 million or more for a new model. The Embark training program administered by Cirrus Training Centers started a few years ago and while I don’t have stats at hand, I’d bet that it saved at least one wreck. A guy buys an older used Cirrus as a step-up from the Cherokee, jumps in and starts flying after a quick checkout from a local instructor with no formal Cirrus training experience and fatally balls it up on a botched go-around. True story.