In the early 2000s Cirrus learned that equipping an airplane with a parachute and gee-whiz avionics doesn’t necessarily make it safe. As was proven more recently, favorable accident stats come from focused training. But as one Cirrus sales pro put it, it’s the Wild West when it comes to the market of used SR20s and SR22s because some buyers either get the wrong training or in some cases, no transition training at all. A get-in-and-go approach doesn’t work we’ll in a Cirrus.
While no fault of the company, it’s an ugly day for the Cirrus brand when the new owner of a used SR22 makes the evening news after balling one up, as was the case not far from my home field this past spring. The second-gen SR22 wasn’t in the owner’s hands for more than a couple of weeks before it ended up in a fireball on the other side of the airport fence after several unstable attempts at landing in benign visual conditions. Ivy McIver at Cirrus told me these kinds of mishaps are why the company decided to offer complimentary transition training to Cirrus buyers new to the aircraft—no matter its age or where it was sourced.