When Lauren McCollum took up flying again last spring, after a 15-year break, she wanted a plane that she could take far and fast. But as a long-lapsed pilot, the Los Angeles property developer did not want an aircraft that would intimidate her. Her flight instructor suggested an airplane that McCollum hadn't even heard of. One demonstration flight later, she was hooked on a Cirrus SR22, a sleek and powerful four-seater whose designers are trying to reinvent the small plane, not to mention the small-plane industry. "I'm a techno-nerd," says McCollum, "and when I saw those two computer screens in the cockpit where there usually are a bunch of round gauges, I immediately felt at ease with all that info. It's like having your laptop to help fly a plane."
Cirrus Design, based in Duluth, Minn., which began mass-producing its small planes only in 1999, is bucking industry trends to become the fastest-growing general-aviation manufacturer in the world. In 2001 Cirrus captured just 11% of the market for single-engine piston planes, but now it accounts for almost one-third. Impressive, but it comes in an industry that has been struggling to regain altitude. Sales of all small airplanes hit an all-time high of 18,000 in 1978 but dropped to 2,600 just five years later, hurt in particular by liability issues. Things got so bad that in 1986, Cessna temporarily stopped production of single-engine aircraft.
Unlike other new-entrant designers such as Lancair and Diamond Aircraft--which sell similar high-performance, artfully designed planes--Cirrus has set its sights on the granddaddy of airplane builders, the venerable 76-year-old Cessna Aircraft Co. of Wichita, Kans. The Textron subsidiary has sold more than 23,000 of its Skylane 182s, and the distinctive, high-wing, small-propeller planes are so ubiquitous that there probably isn't a pilot who hasn't flown a Cessna at least once.
Cirrus is not just taking on Cessna at home. The manufacturer sold its 100th plane in Europe last May, bringing to $27 million Cirrus' revenues there. (That month the company also sold its first plane to a Russian customer, who requested extra tires, spark plugs and chewing gum.) As in the domestic market, plane owners overseas act as an auxiliary sales force. At the company's celebration of its 100th European sale in June, more than two-thirds of Cirrus' European owners flew their planes in to meet the others.
Cirrus is planning to take control of the skies by not actually thinking like an airplane maker, says CEO Alan Klapmeier, 44, who along with his brother Dale, 42, founded the company. The two--who started tinkering with user-friendly, homemade planes in their parents' dairy barn near Baraboo, Wis., in the mid-1980s--created Cirrus from a clean sheet of paper. "Plane design and performance hadn't really changed in decades," says Alan, a physics major, who is determined to make flying more accessible. "We were convinced there was a market for a very safe, smartly designed, high-performance airplane. We thought of building a plane that was as easy to drive as a very good car."