Cirrus G2 Vision Jet

ByHank Gibson

Well, that was fast.

In January, Cirrus announced the Generation 2 SF50 Vision Jet.  After getting the Generation 1 Vision Jet certified in late 2016, Cirrus didn’t waste any time in starting in on improvements.

The improvements are pretty sweet, making the G2 Vision Jet even easier to fly and step into for Cirrus’ target market, SR22 owners.

Here are the improvements on the G2 Vision Jet.

RVSM Approval

The G2 Vision Jet has received RVSM approval, allowing the airplane to fly at 31,000 feet.  RVSM stands for Reduced Vertical Separation Minimums (read more about RVSM here).  RVSM airspace starts at 28,000 feet, the G1 Vision Jet’s ceiling.  Now that the G2 Vision Jet is RVSM certified, it can fly at 31,000 feet.

For piston pilots, you are left scratching your head as to the advantage of this.  In a jet, the higher you go, the thinner the air, so the faster you go, and the less fuel you burn since the thin air needs less fuel to mix with.  This caps out at a certain altitude and the speed begins dropping and you start losing efficiency (even though the fuel burn is quite low).

According to Cirrus, at 31,000 feet, the G2 Vision Jet cruises over 300 KTAS and gets a range boost to almost 1,200 nm.

Garmin Perspective Touch+

Cirrus & Garmin have taken the new NXi interface and paired it with the Garmin Perspective Touch to create the Touch+.  You can read about the improvements on the NXi here, all of which are included in the Touch+ in the G2 Vision Jet.

The big improvement that is included in the Touch+ is Autothrottle capability.  An Autothrottle is integrated with the autopilot.  It automatically adjusts power settings and speeds based on the phase of flight without the pilot having to touch the throttle.  Pretty cool.

New Cabin

The G2 Vision Jet has a redesigned cabin as well, making it an extremely passenger friendly airplane.  The second row has been redesigned and equipped with a center console.  There is also a drop down TV screen that allows passengers to connect their mobile devices to it to watch movies or videos while traveling (no internet on board, yet.  That’ll probably be the G3 Vision Jet!).

Cirrus also put in more noise reduction in the cabin, creating a quieter ride for passengers.  Cirrus also allows for multiple different seating configurations, depending on the needs of the owner.

As always, Cirrus is on the leading edge of airplane technology, creating airplanes that are easy as well as fun to fly.  I’m excited to see how they continue to improve the design to both the SR22 and the Vision Jet.

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  • Night Flying

    ByHank Gibson

    Ah, fall is finally here.  In Texas, it arrived about a month late, but showed up with a vengeance.  A strong cold front caused a 40 degree temperature drop in 12 hours earlier this week, bringing rain, lower freezing levels, and lots of wind.

    Fall means cooler temps, but fall also means less light.  The sun begins to set sooner, plus the fall back time change in November cause darkness to spring upon an unaware pilot.

    Before getting in to too many night landings tips, just a friendly reminder, passengers can only be carried at night if the PIC has completed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop in the last 90 days during the time period of 1 hour after sunset to 1 hour before sunrise.

    Lots of us have been landing long before sunset for most of the past couple of months, so those night flying skills might be a little rusty.  The best way to remedy night flying rustiness?  Call an instructor and go get some practice.

    In the meantime, here are some tips as to what to expect for your next night flying experience.

    1. Your Eyes Are Very Important.  This may seem like an obvious statement, but night vision can be affected by many things.  Before you takeoff, you want to make sure you can see in the dark.  The FAA recommends no bright lights 30 minutes prior to takeoff.  They also recommend using oxygen at night as this greatly improves night vision, even at low altitudes.  Use off center viewing to help spot traffic or other objects in the air.  Finally, when preflighting, use a red flashlight as much as possible, but if you do have to use a white light, close one eye to keep one eye from being blinded.
    2. Utilize Approach Lights on Landing.  Night landings are very different then day landings.  It is very difficult to get the proper depth perception, not too mention see obstacles below you on your final approach to a runway.  PAPI’s, VASI’s, and instrument approach glide slope’s become very important.  If you are VFR only pilot, if your airport has a PAPI or a VASI, keep 2 white and 2 red (or 1 white and 1 red) lights.  If you see 3 red (or 2 red), climb.  If you see 4 red, definitely climb.  If you are an IFR pilot, I highly recommend always flying an approach at night.  What if your airport doesn’t have a PAPI, VASI, or approach with a glide slope?  You might not want to utilize it at night.  One side note on VFR flight: Clouds are nearly invisible at night.  If you do fly into a cloud (a clue is your strobe lights start reflecting back at you), don’t panic.  If you have an autopilot, turn it on and execute a 180 degree level turn.  If you don’t have an autopilot, start scanning your instruments, keep your attitude indicator blue side up, and make a shallow 180 degree while maintaining altitude.  Then call ATC, advise them what happened, and ask for help.  One more note:  I highly recommend that if a pilot finds that he/she will fly at night at lot, get an instrument rating and fly IFR at night.  It’s much safer.
    3. Practice Landings Before Carrying Passengers.  The tendency when landing at night is to level off too high before flaring, causing the airplane to bleed off speed and energy too high above the runway.  This can lead to a stall, a hard landing, and/or too high of a pitch attitude at touch down causing a tail strike. A good tip is start your level off when you can see the tire marks on the runway.  Make sure you practice night landings, preferably with an experienced instructor who is night current and proficient, before carrying any passengers on board, even if you are night current, but haven’t landed at night in a while.
    4. Night Emergencies.  For engine failures at night, you are very limited on options.  Unless you have a Cirrus equipped with a CAPS parachute system, you really have two options if an airport isn’t within gliding distance.  Find a wide, lighted road that appears to be lightly trafficked.  A word of caution, though:  be careful of light poles, fences, concrete medians, cars, and buildings.  The LA freeway would not be a good option (though there are exceptions to this rule as is evidenced by the picture below).  The second option is find a dark spot and pray it’s a field (or the Hudson River).  As you get closer, you can turn your landing light on to see what the ground looks like.  If it looks good, keep the light on and continue.  If you don’t like what you see, turn your landing light off and continue….

    Flying at night can be the best time of day to fly.  It’s usually smoother, cooler, and you get to see all the city lights.  It is a very different environment, however, so make sure to get some training before darkness settles in on your next trip.

  • Registration Now Open for the 2025 Texas Top Aviation Fly-In!

    ByHank Gibson

    Are you ready to take part in one of the most exciting Texas aviation events of the year? Registration is now open for the 2025 Texas Top Aviation Fly-In, happening March 26th-28th, 2025, at the stunning Lajitas Golf Resort in Lajitas, Texas.

    Whether you’re a pilot looking for a getaway, wanting to make new pilot buddies, or just seeking a one-of-a-kind adventure, the 2025 Texas Top Aviation Fly-In promises an unparalleled blend of community, aviation instruction, and scenic Big Bend recreation. Not to mention, great golf!

    Why You Should Register

    As one of the top 2025 Texas aviation events, this Fly-In features:

    • Two rounds of golf at the #1-ranked Black Jack’s Crossing Golf Course
    • Aviation seminars from industry leaders
    • Making new friends and seeing old ones at our group dinners
    • Non-golfing activities, like Jeep rentals, exploring Big Bend, or relaxing at the Resort spa

    Spaces are limited, so secure your spot now for our 6th Annual Fly-In!

    Event Highlights

    Fly-In Golf Tournament

    Enjoy two rounds of golf at Black Jack’s Crossing Golf Course:

    • Round 1: March 26th, 2025, 1:30 PM
    • Round 2: March 27th, 2025, 1:30 PM

    Aviation Seminars

    Learn from top experts on Thursday morning, March 27th, 2025:

    • Paul New: Cirrus and Cessna mechanic
    • Scott Williams: Aviation attorney
    • Travis Ulhorn: San Antonio Air Traffic Controller

    Community and Connection

    Relax and connect at evening group dinners starting at 7:30 PM.

    Pricing

    • $1,475 per person (2 nights + golf) + tax
    • $1,100 per person (2 nights, no golf) + tax
    • $475 for non-golfing spouse + tax

    Registration includes lodging and golf; food and beverages will be billed directly to the attendee.

    Key Details

    • Golfers: Arrive by noon, March 26th, 2025
    • Non-Golfers: Arrive by dinner on March 26th
    • Complimentary shuttles provided from Lajitas International Airport (T89)

    Register Today

    Don’t miss out on one of the best Texas aviation events of the year. Register now and be part of the 2025 Texas Top Aviation Fly-In. Spaces are limited, so don’t wait!

  • Angle of Attack (AOA)

    ByMike Hostage

    You are hand-flying an in-the-weather descent, power back, heading for the FAF. You start a 30 degree banked turn at your lead point to cross the FAF, when your passenger behind you gasps. Looking over your shoulder, you see he has spilled his drink into his lap…too bad for him! However, when you turn your head back to your panel, your inner ear tumbles and you see 45 degrees of bank, 15 degrees nose low, airspeed increasing.

    Congratulations! You have managed to get distracted and sucked into an unusual attitude recovery. By the book, you should roll wings level, pull to the horizon, and adjust power as necessary to keep the airspeed within limits. In this scenario, if you had not experienced vertigo, you might have been able to roll to less than 30 degrees of bank, recover your turn, pull the nose up to less than the original descent attitude, pulled a bit of power to slow back to your desired penetration speed and then resumed your desired ground track. However, this would only be appropriate if you had full situational awareness as to the deviations caused by the look over your shoulder, plus full confidence that the moderate corrective actions would put you back on your desired flight path.

    As a military aviator, I learned unusual attitude recoveries based upon hard maneuvering at extreme pitch and bank angles. In the hard-maneuvering environment, an unusual attitude could be 90 degrees straight up, airspeed decreasing below 120 kts…or 80 degrees nose low, 135 degrees of bank, airspeed increasing through 500 kts… etc. In these cases, understanding angle of attack, or AOA, is critical to maintaining controlled flight and returning to a normal attitude.

    In an extreme nose-high attitude, a military aviator is trained to roll the aircraft to 90 degrees of bank, ease off the back-stick pressure to reduce AOA, add power as required, and allow the nose to slice back towards level, rolling to wings level as the nose approaches the horizon. If nose low, the recovery procedure is to roll rapidly, within asymmetric g limits, until wings level, then to pull at optimum g loading to recover to level flight. For the nose-low recovery, power was normally reduced until airspeed could be assessed and brought under control. However, when doing the nose-low pullout at 7-9 gs, pulling the power for too long would leave you much to slow to resume combat.

    The AOA gauge on a fighter’s glare shield is a primary reference during hard maneuvering and for landing. The AOA for optimum maneuvering is 13 degrees, displayed as the green circle or “green donut” on the gauge. The red chevron on top represents a slow condition of 15 degrees or more and the yellow lower chevron represents 11 degrees or less.

    For normal landing in the F-16C, the pilot slows to 220 kts and configures abeam the touchdown point while mentally computing the final approach airspeed of 136 kts plus 4 additional knots for each 1000 lbs of fuel. When rolling off the perch and flying the final turn, the pilot would usually only glance once at the airspeed once to ensure final turn airspeed of 180 kts while using the AOA sight gauge as the primary indicator of a best performance turn. As long as the AOA was green donut (13 degrees) or less, you would not stall. If on speed and 13 degrees wasn’t going to get you around the turn to line up with the runway, you knew you were going to overshoot. You never wanted to see the red chevron of 15 degrees or more as that meant you were too slow, pulling too hard, and in danger of building an un-recoverable sink rate!

    Few GA aircraft are currently equipped with AOA indicators, though there are several after market devices available for retrofit. However, knowing the impact of AOA and how to manage it is vital to safe aviating, even without an AOA gauge. The bottom line is, as long as you don’t ask the wing to produce more angle of attack than it can handle, you won’t stall.

    Practicing final turn stalls, to know what the wing feels like as you get too slow or pull too much on the controls, increasing AOA past the critical point, will keep you safe when you encounter that unexpected overshooting wind or you find yourself inadvertently on too tight of a downwind leg. Better to overshoot or take it around to try again, than to pull too hard and exceed critical AOA.

    Mike Hostage is a retired USAF pilot with 37 years of experience, flying a wide variety of aircraft.  An instructor pilot for more than half of his 4800 flight hours, Mike is currently qualified in a Cirrus SR-22T and regularly flies his two homebuilt sailplanes.

  • IM SAFE: Are You Really?

    ByHank Gibson

    As pilots, we are all familiar with the IM SAFE acronym that the FAA puts out.  It comes up as part of the ground training over Human Factors during private pilot ground school.  We all memorize it, spit it out for our check rides, then most of us promptly forget about it.

    When I was training for my pilot’s licenses, I was at a Part 141 school that was very standardized (LeTourneau University, who has a fabulous aviation school).  Before each flight, we had to do a self evaluation based on the weather and the IM SAFE checklist.  Based on our answers, we would then determine if the conditions were conducive to flying as well as if I was physically okay to fly.

    This was a great tool because not only do pilots have to pre-flight the airplane, they also need to pre-flight themselves.  It’s very easy to fall into one of the “Hazardous Attitudes” if there is a pressing meeting or you haven’t flown in a while and it’s a beautiful day, but maybe you aren’t physically fit to control an airplane.

    Let’s break down the IM SAFE checklist to dig a little deeper into the physically fit side of flying.

    Illness

    This one is pretty easy.  Are you sick?  If so, how sick?  If you can’t hardly talk or your body feels like it was hit by a truck, then flying probably isn’t in your best interest.

    The tricky area can become if you are only a little sick.  Maybe you have a cough or a little cold or a headache is starting to form.  You probably could go fly, but is it really a good idea?  It could be something worse, or it may be nothing.  You have to know yourself and put limits on yourself before you wake up on the day of your big meeting two states over.  Set illness personal minimums and stick to them.

    Medication

    There are a slew of drugs, both prescription and over the counter, that pilots cannot take and fly.  AOPA has a hotline to call for pilots to find out if they can fly with the medication they are taking, or what meds they can take to give them relief and still operate an aircraft.

    Another great resource is your medical examiner.  Just give him/her a call and they will be more than happy to let you know what you can and can’t take.  They’ve been educated in the area of aviation so they are very knowledgeable.

    Stress

    StressometerThis is a huge one that pilots ignore a lot.  Maybe it was a stressful day at work, maybe you are running late to the airport, your meeting got moved up, whatever.  Stress can jump on you and mess up a pilot’s thinking very quickly.  If you have a lot of other things on your mind and you aren’t able to focus just on flying, it might be a good idea to stay on the ground.

     

    Alcohol

    Out of the whole IM SAFE list, the alcohol limitations are very clearly defined.  8 hours bottle to throttle, no more than 0.04% BAC, no operating an airplane while under the influence, and no carrying passengers who are visibly intoxicated.  For your personal minimums, it’s a good idea to increase that time to 12, 18 or even 24 hours bottle to throttle.

    Fatigue

    Learning to fly while a college student led to a fair share of canceled flights due to fatigue.  I operate best on 8 hours of sleep in the past 24 hours.  I can function on 6, but anything less than 6 hours, my performance drastically drops off, sometimes to a point where I wouldn’t be safe.  I discovered this while with my flight instructor attempting to do a holding pattern and completely botching it up.

    I observed this as a CFI quite often.  If I was doing ground with a student and they were struggling, my first question would be, how much sleep did you get last night?  More often than not, if I had to ask that question, I would get an average answer of 3 to 4 hours (I even had one guy show up for a flight block on 2 hours sleep.  I sent him back to the dorm).

    Fatigue is very easily overlooked because it’s not measurable.  Needing to get a flight lesson done or needing to get somewhere when you are obviously fatigued is not a good idea.  Make sure you get a good night’s sleep before a flight and don’t be afraid to cancel if you didn’t.  Set some sleep personal minimums and make them hard and fast.

    Eating

    Don’t skip meals and fly.  Performance greatly decreases when a pilot is hungry.  At the very least, stick a couple of food bars in your flight bag to give you some nourishment.

    Also, stay hydrated, especially in the summer time.  I carry a huge bottle of water with me on all my flights because I get headaches if I don’t drink enough.  Getting dehydrated on a long flight can lead to all sorts of performance problems (over hydration is also a problem in the air, but that’s what Gatorade bottles are for, right?).

    All this to say, have some personal minimums when it comes to you and your body.  Check the plane, check the weather and check yourself.  If anything falls in the “red” area in any one of those three categories, stay on the ground and don’t press your luck.

  • Cirrus SR22 Owner Completes First Solo

    ByHank Gibson

     

    Monte and N565TV

    Congratulations to Monte James who, on July 31, 2014, completed his first solo flight!  Monte is the owner of N565TV, a 2007 Turbonormalized Cirrus SR22.  N565TV is a G3 model with an Avidyne panel.  Monte was very excited to complete his solo flight.  He reported very good landings during the flight (he even said the last landing, which was probably his best yet, caused him to break into laughter!).  Texas Top Aviation’s Hank Gibson, Monte’s instructor, took pictures and continued the tradition of cutting Monte’s shirt tail to commemorate the flight.

    Congratulations to Monte!

     

  • An Innovative ADS-B Solution from uAvionix

    ByHank Gibson

    The closer we get to 2020, the more innovative companies are getting with ADS-B out solutions.  There are a myriad of transponders out there that have been released in to meet the ADS-B out requirement and to offer ADS-B in options.  L3 has the Lynx transponder line (and hardware to upgrade an already installed GTX 327 or GTX 330), Garmin has the GTX 345 and offers upgrades to the GTX 330, Appareo has it’s Stratus ESGi ADS-B out transponder, and Avidyne offers it’s AXP340 transponder, among others.

    Most of the ADS-B solutions require some kind of panel work, whether it’s pulling out the Garmin GTX 330 to send off, or making panel modifications to fit the L3 Lynx in.  Very few are actual slide in replacements, so there is some labor involved in swapping transponders.

    Want a simpler and more innovative solution?  uAvionix, a Montana based company that makes the recently released Scout portable ADS-B In solution, has a product for you.  Meet the SkyBeacon.

    What is it?  The uAvionix SkyBeacon is simply a navigation light replacement that bolts on your wing with a fin that hangs down.  All the ADS-B out transmitting equipment is placed behind the nav light on the device.  It has an integrated WAAS GPS unit, can work with any Mode C or Mode S transponder wirelessly, and it mounts directly in to where the original nav light was, same screws and everything.  No additional hardware needed.  uAvionix claims installation should take 10 minutes.

    Configuration is super easy too, as it is all done on a smart phone on the uAvionix app.

    Right now, the uAvionix SkyBeacon is only approved for experimental aircraft, but, according to their website, uAvionix expects FAA certification in early spring.  With a price tag of only $1,500 and a strobe light to be added as well, this is your simplest and easiest ADS-B compliance solution.

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