Cirrus doesn't just build and sell personal planes anymore. Knoxville is why

Pilots at Cirrus are used to flying thousands of feet above Knoxville. When they look down, they see a city that helped transform their company from an aircraft engineering firm into a global lifestyle brand selling the dream of personal planes.

At its customer service center at McGhee Tyson Airport, the company has crafted an enviable experience for customers which includes custom painted jets, state-of-the-art simulators, personalized delivery events and meals shared between flight trainees and trainers.

Cirrus, formerly doing business as Cirrus Aircraft, builds its planes at company headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, and flies them to Knoxville, where customers pick them up to great fanfare.

Since opening the Vision Center in Knoxville in 2016, Cirrus has built a complex of six hangars and expanded services to include comprehensive flight training and a full-scale marketing production studio.

As personal relationships blossomed between flight trainers and customers, and its visually stunning marketing campaigns spread on social media, the company officially evolved its brand.

On Feb. 21, Cirrus announced it would change its name and logo, intended to reflect its status as a one-stop shop for people who want to learn to fly personal planes built with digital innovation.

The company chose Knoxville as its customer hub because of its talent base, easy flying conditions, convenient airport, central location and tourism appeal. Ivy McIver, executive director of Cirrus' SR Series Product Line, told Knox News the company encourages its clientele to spend time in the city.

"Knoxville is a place that people want to be and come visit. You see sales directors bringing people to Knoxville all the time to show them around and meet all the different people from here," McIver said. "In Duluth, it wasn't quite like that, because it was very much a manufacturing facility."

The Cirrus customer base includes CEOs, tech executives and business owners from places as far as Australia, Brazil, Germany and South Africa, who come to learn at Cirrus and spend money in Knoxville's wider economy. New Cirrus aircraft cost between $580,000 for a base prop plane model up to more than $3 million for the most advanced jets.

Cirrus sells a seductive vision of soaring above the earth in planes that feature leather seats, USB ports, cup holders and touch screen displays. Its marketing features families packing their planes for a road trip without roads.

Knox News got a taste of the world of Cirrus with a flight over Knoxville in a new plane and a test in the company's newest full-flight jet simulator.

Cirrus teaches customers how to fly at Knoxville center

Cirrus' Vision Center applies the dealership model to general aviation, but the 250 staff in Knoxville work beyond just sales and financing. Trainers help customers secure and maintain their private pilot license.

Learning to fly can be daunting. As many as 40% of Cirrus customers have no prior experience in aviation, a number that ticked up during the pandemic, McIver said. The company works with trainees through the entire process, from ground school to first solo flight and recurring training, though not everyone who learns with Cirrus buys a plane from them.

Cirrus also works with aircraft customers to design a plane that fits their personality, often with custom paint jobs. Some owners get their jets painted to match their luxury sports cars, creating something like the archetypal backdrop of a music video.

When the planes are delivered, after a process of training and manufacturing that can last years, Cirrus personalizes the delivery for the customer, complete with gifts. Stage lights in its delivery hangar flash along to the customer's favorite song.

"The old tagline of the company was 'the mind of an engineer, the heart of a pilot' and it was a very engineering-driven company," said McIver, who has worked at Cirrus for 18 years. "That is still in the DNA of the innovation, but we've also gotten a lot more sophisticated with marketing and lifestyle."

Cirrus builds two series of aircraft. Its Vision Jet is the world's only single-engine personal jet and has been the best-selling personal jet for the past five years. Its SR series of piston planes dominates the global market of high-performance single-engine propeller planes.

The award-winning Vision Jets have pressurized cabins and can fly up to 31,000 feet. They are equipped with a system called Safe Return, which can land the plane automatically with the push of a button in an emergency situation. The SR planes fly up to 25,000 feet, and the latest generations feature touch screen displays.

All Cirrus aircraft are built with a safety mechanism the company calls "the most significant innovation in the last 50 years of aviation": the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System, a full-plane parachute.

The emergency parachute, which debuted in 1998 and has helped over 250 passengers reach the ground safely, is the world's only full-plane parachute included as standard equipment.

Chandler Orr, a supervisor for flight operations, trains customers on Cirrus's Vision Jet simulators. A Knoxville native, he now makes dreams come true for people from around the country and the world.

The company leases its land from McGhee Tyson, a typical relationship between a commercial airport and a general aviation company. Its pilots use the same runways and air traffic control system used by American or Delta Airlines pilots.

One benefit of personal planes is the connectivity of small general aviation airports like Downtown Island Airport in Knoxville, operated by the same authority as McGhee Tyson. There are over 5,000 public airports in the U.S. and the vast majority are small airports for personal planes.

Knox News flies over Knoxville in a Cirrus plane

The first thing that stands out about Cirrus planes are their striking resemblance to a car on the inside.

When Knox News got a demo flight on the new SR Series G7, which debuted in January and retails at around $1.2 million, I climbed into the leather back seat and bucked myself in. There was adjustable AC, cup holders, a charging port for my phone, and space in the trunk for luggage.

McIver, our pilot, has been flying for 25 years. She demonstrated for me and Knox News photographer Hannah Mattix the ease of getting the plane off the ground. We were among the first 50 people in the world to fly in the new plane model.

"You walk out to the plane, you make sure the plane is fit to fly, you hop in, you call the tower, and you're off," McIver said.

The display of the plane is touch screen, nothing like the only other small plane I'd flown in, an antique Vietnam War-era piston plane with barely enough room for two people. The plane is user friendly but highly capable, McIver said, and it has all the "goodies" a pilot could want.

I thought the same was true for passengers. In the Cirrus plane, I could pull out a book if I wanted and stretch across the seats.

We took off from a McGhee Tyson runway on a sunny and cloudless day, climbing to about 4,500 feet above Knoxville. I saw the shadow of our plane gliding across the houses of subdivisions, which looked like sugar cubes.

Where a commercial jet would keep climbing higher until the landscape below blurred into a vague America, the sights from the plane were intensely personal. I saw the house on Clinch Avenue where I lived during my junior year at the University of Tennessee and the apartment in Sequoyah Hills where I lived senior year. I saw the place where I'd gotten my hair cut that very morning.

We soared across Knox County and I gained an appreciation for the shockingly sharp curves of the Tennessee River. We descended to about 1,000 feet above downtown Knoxville, curving around the Sunsphere and Neyland Stadium. I'd stared up for years at small planes flying over Knoxville, and now I understand their allure intimately.

Our photographer in the front seat took over the plane's controls for a few minutes before handing them back to McIver, who landed us smoothly back at McGhee Tyson.

My chance to fly came back on the ground, inside Cirrus' new Vision Jet simulator. Perched high up on what look like metal stilts, the high tech simulator can buck and sway like a jet caught in turbulence. Once the door to the simulator closes, it looks nearly identical to the inside of the jets.

The jet simulator creates some of the worst-case scenarios to prepare pilots for engine failures or, even worse, an electric fire. When it simulates the fire, smoke pours into the fake cabin. We did not experience that particular simulation.

Instead, the plane simulated the ballistic ejection of the whole-plane parachute. Orr, the flight supervisor, directed me to place both hands on the red handle above my head and pull straight down. There was a small explosive noise as the parachute rocketed out, and then there were a few seconds of stillness.

Then the parachute caught the air and we were shaken so forcefully my phone flew forward off my lap onto the simulator floor.

We settled in for an almost meditative descent back to the earth. What we could not see from thousands of feet in the air was that we were right above the Tennessee River. We landed in the virtual reality river and, mercifully, did not sink below its surface.

We walked back off the simulator to the lobby of the Vision Center, where another vision laid before us. Cirrus owners and their trainers were sitting to a complimentary weekday lunch of glazed salmon, a beautiful crafted salad and thick slices of cheesecake.

Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Phone 423-637-0878. Email daniel.dassow@knoxnews.com.

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