A barn in Baraboo

Cirrus began in the early 1980s with foam models and drawings by two college students, Alan and Dale Klapmeier. In 1984 they founded Cirrus Design and, with Jeff and Sally Viken, started building the VK-30, a pusher-propeller kit aircraft, in the basement of the family barn at Baraboo, Wisconsin. It was shown at Oshkosh in 1987 and first flew on 11 February 1988. In 1994 the brothers moved to a much larger site at Duluth International Airport, Minnesota, taking 35 employees with them, and began work on a conventional four-seater.

The parachute and the glass cockpit

That aircraft, the SR20, first flew on 21 March 1995 and was certified on 23 October 1998, followed by the more powerful SR22 in 2000. Both carried two ideas that changed light aviation. Every Cirrus has a ballistic parachute that lowers the whole aircraft to the ground, and in February 2003 Cirrus delivered the industry’s first all-glass-cockpit light aircraft. Within three years, more than 90 per cent of new light aircraft had glass cockpits. The SR22 has been the world’s best-selling general aviation aircraft every year since 2003, and in 2006 the 3,000th SR came off the line.

Sold to Beijing, saved by a jet

The 2008 crash nearly killed the company: production fell from 16 aircraft a week to a fraction of that, hundreds were laid off, and a planned jet stalled. In 2011 Cirrus was sold for 210 million dollars to CAIGA, part of China’s state-owned AVIC, despite objections in Congress. The money revived the jet. The Vision SF50, a seven-seat single-engine jet with a parachute and later an autoland system, was certified on 28 October 2016 and won the Collier Trophy. By December 2025 Cirrus had built 11,000 SR-series aircraft, and in 2025 it shipped 797 aircraft, more than any other aviation company.

Fabrieken

• Duluth headquarters and assembly · Duluth International Airport, Minnesota — Main plant since 1994
• Grand Forks composites plant · Grand Forks, North Dakota — Opened 1997; builds composite components
• Vision Center · McGhee Tyson Airport, Knoxville, Tennessee — Customer delivery and service centre opened 12 January 2017

Mensen

• Alan Klapmeier · co-founder, CEO until 2009 — Later tried to buy the jet programme from Cirrus
• Dale Klapmeier · co-founder, later CEO

Records en primeurs

• First all-glass-cockpit light aircraft delivered, February 2003
• Vision SF50: first single-engine civil jet with a whole-airframe parachute; Collier Trophy for 2017
• SR22: most-produced general aviation aircraft of the 21st century and most-produced composite aircraft
• SR22 G7+: first piston aircraft with an emergency autoland system, 2025