Jay Leno Test Flies the Revolutionary Cirrus G3 Vision Jet! | Jay Leno's Garage

Are you guys all ready for takeoff? Yeah. It's up to you. Do you want to, do you want to take the takeoff? I can walk you through it. Yeah, so what we'll do is we'll bring the, as soon as we can take the runway, we'll bring the throttle all the way up to the takeoff position. We're going to feel a little, like a little stop. You want to go push past that, and that's our takeoff thrust. And then we'll be about 85 knots or so, and then we'll just kind of slowly put some back pressure on the stick, and off we go. All right. You can bring thrust to full. Yeah, takeoff thrust. Welcome to the episode of Jay Leno's Garage. For this episode, something completely different, the Cirrus Vision Jet. This is an amazing aircraft, single engine. Well, let me explain. I've had a little bit of experience with jet engines. I've got my motorcycle on an I2K, which has the C-18 out of the Bell Ranger helicopter. We built the Echo Jet. We used the Honeywell LT-101 big jet engine. That's a road car. And we have the Chrysler turbine car, which was built in the early 60s. Sam Williams was one of the guys involved in that. His son now runs Williams Turbines out of Detroit, and they built the engine for this. So it's kind of a connection between my turbine car and this. I've had a lot of experience with turbines on the ground, never flown one in the air, and that's what we're going to do today. We're going to, I'm going to fly this plane. I know it sounds ridiculous, but, you know, this Cirrus is a pretty amazing aircraft. Revolutionary, at least to somebody like me. I'm an on the ground guy. I just didn't pay a lot of attention. And, oh, a while back, six, eight months ago, I guess it was, Cirrus came in with a prop plane, and it had the parachute feature. Should the pilot become incapacitated, the plane can land itself. It can communicate with the tower. I mean, it's just amazing, amazing technology. And this is their latest aircraft here. Let's bring in the gentleman who knows, well, way more than me, Matt Bergwald. Matt, come on in. Now, what is your official title at Cirrus? Hey, Jay, I'm the executive director of the VisionJet product line at Cirrus Aircraft. So my main job is to bring new products to market. And this is an amazing product. You know, jet planes are always eight, nine, ten million dollars. This is less than a Bugatti Chiron, isn't it? That's about 5.2, and this is what, about three and a half? It's about 3.6 million dollars for a fully loaded generation three VisionJet. Okay. And it has all the safety features. It's got the parachute deal, right? And I was stunned to learn that something like 320 people have been saved. There has, yeah, with our SR series airplane and then our VisionJet, we've had about over 300 people who have returned their families because of that technology. Yeah. I mean, what it does was it will either land the plane. Let's say you're in a plane and a pilot has a heart attack as a passenger. And we did this with the prop plane. You hit a button. It immediately finds the nearest airport in the air. It communicates with the tower, keeps you the passenger. If you're sitting this thing by yourself, the pilot's dead. What do you do now? You know, and it's pretty cool. And we took off and we landed the plane without me touching a thing. And it was pretty amazing. And that was a prop plane. This is a jet and it has all the same features. Yeah, all the same features. It has the Cirrus airframe parachute. It actually comes out of the nose of the jet versus the tail on the SR. Okay, so it comes down this way. It does. It comes out this way. The airplane still kind of comes and floats gently down to the ground, though. Okay. In fact, the VisionJet's about 6,000 pounds. That parachute is about 6,000 square feet in order when that actually does inflate and you kind of come under canopy. So it's quite a bit of area. What did you say this plane weighs? 6,000 pounds. So this is 1,500 pounds heavier than a Tesla? Good point. Boy, now you see, I would have guessed 10,000 pounds. I don't know why. But it's carbon fiber, right? Yep. And carbon fiber can meet all the stringent, obviously it can, of aluminum. How many people are building carbon fiber planes? Is this a common material now or are you guys the only ones doing it? It's not that common. So, I mean, Cirrus does specialize in kind of using composites for kind of all their airplanes, whether it's the SR or carbon fiber here for the VisionJet. But what's pretty unique about the carbon fiber is you're able to actually shape the airplane and you can tell right now it's like an egg shape in the cabin. And the whole reason for that shape is to optimize the passenger and pilot experience in the airplane. So you have shoulder room where you want shoulder room, you have head room where you want head room. Right. And it's just kind of, it's a little bit of a deviation kind of for the traditional airplanes are usually more of a tube. I just can't get over how light it is. I mean, just this much of anything seems like it would be. If this was an aluminum plane, which is the most common material, correct? What would it weigh? You will see similar weights as well. The biggest thing there you get is just you don't, you're not able to shape it if you want to. And the thing is, the airplanes have to be light. We're defying the laws of gravity every day. So the weights are very important. And if you're wondering how we got it in here, well, you just pop these, the wings come off. For this particular airplane. Yes. Yes. This is our, our, our mock-up that we bring to. Oh, I see. The wings don't detach on the. Not on the current vision. Not in the car. Okay. I got it. We'll see. It's just what I know. I was going to say that seems like it'd be a little dicey. Hey, wait a minute. Yeah. Oh, pretty amazing. And how many people does it seat? If it's a six adults and up to seven people. Okay. Oh, very cool. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. And what is the range of something like this? You can get about a thousand miles or so. And really just depends how many people you have. And it's a, I mean, it's a great regional travel airplane, New York to Chicago, that kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. At least not for nonstop or, I mean, we got here and two stops coming from Knoxville, Tennessee, and we're here in a little less than seven hours. Oh, okay. Well, that's pretty amazing. And what is the equivalent horsepower of a single engine like this? Is it measured in horsepower? So we have about, it's 18, 1846 pounds of thrust comes out of this Williams FJ 33 engine, which is actually the smallest engine that's on a general, in general aviation right now, jet engines. I mean, a lot of times I'll fly a layer 450 and it's just a fire hose hooked up to the gas pump. I mean, oh my God, does this get pretty good mileage? It does. So when you get up to altitude, you'd be sipping about a 60 gallons per hour, which is very, it's a very small number in terms of jet engines. My motorcycle with the C18 Allison, that drinks eight gallons an hour. Okay. Yeah. So when you say you're sitting in LA traffic for a half hour of your hour, this is not very economical at all. This is terrible. It's a horrible thing. That is very good. All right. So very cool. What else? Show us some other features. What else do we have here? The thing that sticks out the most is probably the V tail kind of in the back. I mean, that does, it is the most unique thing when you see this airplane on, on the ramp. The second thing is pretty unique is the fact that it's just a single engine. So it's a little easy. It's easier to operate. The costs are, it's a fraction of what most, most jet airplanes are. And I'm always stunned at the amount, the number of small aircraft accidents. It's always the same thing. A pilot had a stroke or got disoriented or something happened. And the people are just, you know, my, I remember talking to a friend of mine about who has the most crashes and he says, doctor, because you get on the plane now, doctor, you know, I'm a doctor. I think, I think I know what I'm doing. Oh, okay. Now I want to show, uh, I'm a doctor. Okay. Now that seems to, that's sort of the joke that goes around. So if you're flying with your doctor friend and he passes out, it's, we will do this on the plane. You just hit the button overhead and it's, it's taken out of your hands. Yeah. We have safe return. That's a standard on all of our vision jets. So if anything, anything happens to the pilot at all, it's accessible to pretty much any passenger that's in the airplane. All they have to do is press this red button and the airplane will take care of itself. Is that the greatest use of AI ever in history? It seems to me like that. It is AI, isn't it? Um, it's not, it's not necessarily AI, but at the same time, I mean, it's still some pretty powerful technology that is able to. I know, but I just hear people kind of trash this technology a lot. Oh, we're going to lose this. Yeah. You'll lose some jobs, but, but you also have amazing, I mean, it literally saves your life. I mean, your family, if you're flying your family somewhere on vacation and you have a heart attack, you're on a plane, everybody's caught. I mean, it's, I find it just to be amazing. And I didn't realize how many planes you had equipped with this. I thought it was a few hundred, 11,000, 12,000 planes you've done. Yeah. So we have Xeris, we have about 11,000 of RSR series airplanes flying around the world. And the jet, we have about 750 jets flying around the world right now. And we've been the best selling jet and general aviation for about the last eight years. Oh, that's great. Now tell me about carbon fiber. When you're in their aircraft, it's carbon fiber, a better insulator against outside noise and aluminum. Is it noisier? I know like some carbon fiber cars that are all carbon fiber and you hear every, in every rock chip bouncing off the inner wheel. Well, I mean, you know, that kind of thing, any advantages or disadvantages over aluminum there, or is it just better? A lot of it's actually in the pressure vessel itself. So we're able to actually come out with one pressure, one piece that is where you pressurize in the airplane. So coming from right here to kind of right where kind of the engine starts. So that is just one piece. So that actually helps quite a bit with the pressurization of the airplane where you don't have various amount of seams or whatnot. That's right. It's not all riveted together, against the aluminum, stronger, equal, about the same. They both have their pros and cons. I mean, we decided to do kind of carbon fiber because that's one of the things we do specialize in. And then again, the biggest thing is we can shape the cabin to optimize that experience because we can just kind of mold it too. Because I know aircraft is so careful about every piece of fabric has to be fireproof and all that. So it's a real sort of feather in the cap of the carbon fiber industry that, oh, it works for this, you know, because you think now we build them aluminum, blah, blah, blah, you know, so. And I imagine it must be caught more cost effective than thousands of little rivets along here, isn't it? It's actually funny. You go to our factories and most time you go to airplane factories, you usually have to wear ear things just because of, you know, there's rivets, rivets. Here we have one little section. That's all that they do is, you know, do some rivets for, you know, a few of the pieces of the airplane. Yeah. It's like when you watch a car show on TV, they always have the guy standing next to the grinder, shooting sparks. He's not doing anything, just shooting sparks. You have to have that guy. Well, I just find it amazing technology because it just, I don't know what the rate of sort of progress is in the airline industry. You know, it seems like it was pretty static for a while. Planes have not changed a whole lot since the 70s. I mean, it's still six and a half hours, whatever it is, to New York City from LA on almost the same plane, probably more fuel efficient and a little more safe, safer probably. But overall, I mean, this is a huge leap. I mean, to get carbon fiber certified, it must have, how many years of testing and you know what I'm saying? It's just crazy. Yeah. So, I mean, our VisionJet program, we started the design phase in the early 2000s. We were starting with actually flying prototypes right about 2008 and then we had to take a little bit of a breather just because of the financial crisis. It actually gave our engineers a bunch of time just to kind of go through and take a lot of the risk out of our program. But when it's all said and done, we were starting to really get into certification kind of starting in about 2011-12 and we were certified in 2016 with our first delivery shortly after. But yeah, it's a big thing for the carbon fiber. The planes have to go through a bunch of structural tests, stress tests, and just kind of making sure, you know, it will withstand and some, you know, just the rigors of flight. Now, can a new pilot go from not being a pilot to a jet or do you have to come up through the prop plane? Well, yeah, usually you come up from the prop plane. The best thing about Cirrus, we have a solution. So, if you do have, you know, you can go into our SR series airplane, you can learn how to fly, you can get the hours and get the proper ratings. It's the most important thing and then you can kind of come up into the jet, you know, after as low as, you know, three, four, five hundred hours. Yeah, I mean, it just seems odd now we have automobiles that are more expensive than airplanes. That doesn't, doesn't compute. I mean, the Bugatti is almost two million dollars more than this and you can get there a lot faster. Well, it's pretty cool. Well, are we ready to go for a spin on this thing? Yeah, let's go for a flight. Let's, uh, hey Ma, I'm gonna fly a plane. Just a quick go through you guys, just a few safety things on the airplane. There is two exits. One is right here is our emergency exit. You can pull, rotate, this thing comes out. It's like a plug and there's that door that we came in on. There's a little knob you got to press and then the handle can rotate up and that would open up. Otherwise, I don't feel good. Something happens to me, you guys know what to do. Red button. Hit the red button. And, um, otherwise, any questions? This airplane actually has something a little, little different too than we've ever had before. It's called ACT Datalink. Yeah. Where you can actually log on and get all your clearances directly from ATCs like text messaging with the air traffic. Alrighty, I got something. And this is our clearance. There we go. Just got our route. So normally ATC would have to actually sit there and tell you all this stuff and you hope you actually can get it right. Here I was just able to get it right kind of via text message. Makes it a lot easier from a pilot's perspective. All right, you guys all ready to go? Yeah, what are you ready? Here we go. You guys all ready for takeoff? Yeah. Ready. And it's up to you. Do you want to, do you want to take the takeoff? I can walk you through it. Yeah, so what we'll do is we'll bring the, as soon as we can take the runway, we'll bring the throttle all the way up to the takeoff position. You're going to feel a little, like a little stop. You want to go push past that and that's our takeoff thrust. But then we'll be about 85 knots or so and then we'll just kind of slowly put some back pressure on the stick and off we go. All the way forward. You got takeoff thrust. 60 knots, 80 knots, pull back. There you go. Off we go. Just like my motorcycle except I'm on the ground. A little bounce. Bring it right to two and three. Now we just put the autopilot on and kind of sit back and kind of enjoy. One of the things you notice about the airplane is just the big windows. Right. That's kind of the very bit, the very first thing that regardless where you're in this cabin, you just see this immense view of, yeah, you really are part of the flight experience. And if you notice, I mean, there's no gallery wall separating us between these guys in back. So everything that we're seeing, everybody's seeing back there as well. So right here, I'm able to use the 280. I was able just to change the heading via this little knob right here. Also, we have an auto throttle on here too. So if I put, just press this, it's actually automatically bringing us to our, what we call max continuous thrust. So this is where we can use it at all times. Takeoff, we can only use for about five minutes, just mainly to get you up, up and up and going. We are going 180 knots across the ground and we're just climbing. So is that about 200 miles per hour? This is our percent thrust. Oh, okay. So, I mean, here we have our N1, N2s. This is where a lot of, most airplanes actually kind of measure their, their power, mainly with the N1. But the biggest difference here is we, our customers are coming from our SRs. We use percent power. We actually use percent thrust. So it honestly is almost exactly the same. So when you're coming in for landing, for example, you're at about 30%. When you're cruising, you're just pretty much going as fast as the engine will let you go. And that's what's kind of nice about the PHADEC as well. I mean, you can kind of see this top of the green arc. So that's just saying with our current temperature and with the heat of the end, all this stuff, it's like, that's that, that's as much power as I want to give you, unless you need takeoff. That's that little cyan thing there where you can then bump it up a little bit further. I just took, I just took it off of the autothrottle. It's like right there where we're at. We got a little extra thrust if we absolutely needed it. And now we're speeding up to almost 240 knots across the ground. So what's flat out? 300? Yeah, it's about 300 kind of knots true airspeed. And, um, and then what it's across the ground just depends which way the wind's blowing. Yeah. Here we have a big, big moving map kind of gives you where the kind of weather is at. Right. Up to 31,000. Most airliners and whatnot are about 35,000 feet. Is this kind of jet allowed at those heights? 31 is as high as we can go. It's just a service limit for the airplane. But, um, if we could, yes, we'd be allowed to fly in there too. It is a little slower than like a lot of, uh, um, like the airliners. So sometimes depending how busy it is, you kind of can become a speed bump. Right. Right. If anything happened to the, anything happened to the engine, first of all, we had the parachute, worst case scenario. Uh, but there's actually this glidering right here, which is this kind of the cyan, but this is pretty much telling us how far we can glide. Right. So it takes into account everything, winds, terrain. So you see the terrain right here. This is the reason why we can only. Now is that glide with the engines off? That's a glide with the engines off. So if anything would happen right now, engine would probably go. Camarillo is probably what I would be heading right towards because it's definitely within our glide range. Oh, it's beautiful. Once you're in the air, you never play with throttle at all. You're never speeding up and slowing down. Um, generally no. Uh, while you're up in the air cruising, I mean, kind of the biggest thing is you want to go as fast as you possibly can. And that's why you have an airplane. That's why you go. Um, and like with us right now, I mean, we're, we're gonna, we're low today. So, I mean, we're not going to really be getting that high. So our fuel burn is not the best, but, but even here, I mean, we can get up to, uh, past the valley here. I mean, essentially to the very Northern portion of California, along the coast, even at a very, uh, fast airspeed and, um, low altitude. Cause yeah, you can see right now we're burning a hundred gallons per hour versus 60 while we're all the way up. So the higher you go, the thinner the air in the morning. Yep. Exactly. You want to see how this thing flies? So right now I just disconnected the autopilot. Right. Um, if you want to go ahead and, uh, you can start handling controls and you just kind of get a little feel for it. Get straight in and out. Boy, it's the slightest input, isn't it? It is. It's just very little. It's not exactly rack and pinion yet. It's just straight on right now. It is. Also, if you see this little green, uh, flap, if you put that right on that white line, that's level flight. If it's below it, it's descent. If it's above it, it's a, um, right on it. There's also trim. You can kind of, when you get, got to get into it too, you can kind of start taking a little bit of trim out, put it in. And the next thing you know, you can kind of almost let go. And then we'll do exactly what you say. When you get a little practice level here, try not to do a barrel roll. Yep. Be level right now. If you want to give me a turn to the left now, you can almost do a whole 180 to about south. Boy, it's just the slightest input. Tell you what, keep that turn kind of coming. But if you feel that right here, feel how the airplane kind of kicks you out. Yeah. So that's something called electronic stability protection. It's almost like similar to like what a traction control is with your car. Yeah. So it just kind of keeps you kind of within kind of an envelope. If you start going one direction, it's just going to kind of go to the way you don't want to do that or start to lose. Then right here, this was the trim I was talking about. We have actually a big wheel right here. You can almost get yourself kind of totally set up for that. You just kind of let go. And you're going to feel it's going to kick you out of here. And the other thing is, let's just say you're like, you know what, I'm tired of this. I don't know where I'm going, what I'm doing anymore. You can hit the level button. You let go. And the airplane will just automatically level itself off. Yeah, that's our airspeed right now is at 200 knots. And you can adjust the thrust level, then kind of go faster or slower. I remember I was with the Blue Angels and he gave me something to hold. He did a bunch of barrel rolls. He said, let go. And the thing went up and I go, I didn't know we were upside down. Yeah, for this plane, we would be a little bit slow. Actually, this is pretty nice. You can actually, it's just like for a climb, you can actually kind of put that up to about like five degrees. That would just kind of maybe a little climb. The reason why I'm climbing, too, is just because of the clouds that are just kind of right here. All right, being like 1-5-0, let's say that's our heading. It's just kind of keeping that kind of level with that horizon. Then actually the 1-5-0 is, we're actually pretty good right there. You can see we're just kind of climbing slightly up. It's only 100 feet off, so it's not really that big of a deal. You just put this, put this a little bit of, point the nose down, like a little bit of pressure down. Then as soon as you get your altitude, which is right there, you can tell right now we're kind of going up a little bit. Yeah, it's kind of cool because like with this, it's, we have a, I mean, we have synthetic vision where you kind of, right there's kind of our line where it's up and down. You could also change it to it's, where it's all of a sudden just kind of ground and that and then right there, that's always right. The level is always when you have the blue matching up the brown. We got this down. Should we try to turn to the right to about a heading of 2-4-0? This is also indicates your bank angles up here. So we're 20 degrees, 30 degrees. And you can also keep that nose up as we're kind of turning. And things happen when you start turning what you have forces of flight. Essentially what makes you turn makes you lose a little bit of your lift. So you actually have to pull up just a little bit and you can just kind of roll right out. And you have to actually put the nose down a little bit because then as you rolled out, that same thing that was making you turn is now becoming lift again. So it pops your nose right up. Want to see a steeper turn? This is kind of considered as soon as you go beyond this, this is starting to become a steeper turn. You can kind of feel the, kind of the g-forces as you're trying to also maintain altitude too. Here we're about a 45 degree bank. And then when you kind of level off, it's just as easy as, again, all that bank helps and becomes lift. Just have to make sure you don't let the nose pop up. But yeah, that's all there is to it. As soon as you get used to it, very controllable. That's all there is to it. Yeah, a little bit more than that, but yeah. So the biggest thing kind of coming into this landing, and I'll be kind of right with you if anything, just kind of follow along with me. We'll be slowing the airplane way down. So what's really nice about this airplane, it goes fast when you want it to go fast, it also goes slow when it wants to go slow. So it can actually, when we're coming in, we're going to be coming in at a pretty slow kind of approach speed. But what's going to happen here is they're probably going to get us on runway 8, and then hopefully we can get a circle of the 15. And then we will kind of essentially do a right downwind, they call it a base, and then you kind of come into final. So a box on runway 15. And we'll just kind of be essentially hitting our altitudes, which I'll set in the avionics. And we'll just kind of come in, and as we're landing, we'll be at a certain airspeed. And then we just kind of round out, and we just kind of flare. That's all there is to it. Yeah, all right. Sounds simple enough. Sure, why not? Yeah, this is the whole approach, this is like the altitude you're supposed to be at. It's funny because it looks kind of complex. But honestly... It's just complex. All it's telling us to do is be at 3,000 feet, then we intercept this thing called the glide slope, and then we have to be able to see the runway by that altitude. That's pretty much what it comes down to. But yeah, this technology is all kind of here to really take these pretty complex tasks and kind of reduce that workload for our, again, non-professional pilots. This auto throttle too can actually kind of change it, it almost becomes like cruise control in your car. But let's just say I want to be at 210 knots, I can set it to be at 210 knots. I can see the in and out. Start slowing us down here. We're too slow on the 20 and 30. Oh, you'll see it in a moment here. I'm going to start putting our gear down. Well, it slows you right down, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. It's a lot of drag, isn't it? First notch of flaps in. All right, now we're right here, kind of lined up for the final. We have, there's actually two red lights, two white lights. That means we're right on glide slope. Right now we're at about 80, 88 knots. Ah, yeah, we're kind of coming in right now. Starting to bring out the power. Start kind of our round out. Give it a flare, just trying to keep it off. Let me just apply a little bit of brakes. It'll be off at Bravo 3 here. I'm stunned at how smooth it is and how quiet it is and how sensitive the controls are. I mean, you're not, you don't even feel like you're moving anything. Just sort of moving with your mind. Just kind of. The Apollo 1 was fun. There was more noise. Was that? Yeah. This is a little more, uh. And we came in on our own this time. It's an amazing concept. The whole parachute idea, the whole. These are all built in Tennessee, eh? They're built in Duluth, Minnesota. That's where the final assembly is. And then Duluth, Tennessee is where we do all our customer deliveries. Hey, I settle for America. I like American made stuff. I mean, I think that's just great. A jet that's cheaper than a car. That would not have been possible a few years ago, would it? No, it's definitely been able for us to produce as many airplanes as we do. Kind of the carbon fiber, kind of the construction, all that stuff kind of helps out. The fact that it's only one engine. The engine that was in my, that Honeywell O3-1. That was like a million bucks just for the engine. Pretty crazy. Wow, that was, you know. It's amazing how unremarkable it is. How smooth, how. It's really something. It's a lot quieter than I thought. I mean, I've got to get a simulator and figure out whatever it is. It is the toughest part, but yeah. A lot of math. Being dyslexic doesn't help. But just great. Thank you very much. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Yeah, that was a once in a lifetime pretty much cool. Then if we will do here, we'll do this, this, this. If you could do me a favor, go to the off position there on that knob. And now press that start stop right on the very top. Shut us down.