{"id":23998,"date":"2020-10-07T09:21:15","date_gmt":"2020-10-07T09:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ceo-na.com\/?p=23998"},"modified":"2020-10-07T14:25:29","modified_gmt":"2020-10-07T14:25:29","slug":"flying-high-in-the-aviation-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/business\/management-leadership\/flying-high-in-the-aviation-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"Still looking to the sky"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Zean Nielsen, CEO of Cirrus Aircraft, believes that the future involves more people getting behind the controls of an aircraft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Zean Nielsen believes that more people should fly\u2014not in the sense of booking a ticket with a commercial airline, but actually becoming pilots and taking the controls of a plane.<\/p>\n

Cirrus Aircraft<\/a>, the company he leads as CEO, also works hard to make such dreams come true, manufacturing some of the most popular and safest light aircraft in the global marketplace, notably the SR Series and Vision JetTM. The story of how the company was born is also the stuff of dreams.<\/p>\n

Co-founders, entrepreneurs, and brothers, Alan and Dale Klapmeier, famously came up with the idea for Cirrus Aircraft while they were teenagers hanging out in their family\u2019s barn in Wisconsin and subsequently formed the company in 1984. The brothers were ranked No. 17 on Flying magazine\u2019s 51 Heroes of Aviation in 2013 and inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2014.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m not sure a lot of people know how convenient personal aviation or general aviation really are,\u201d Nielsen told CEO Magazine in an exclusive interview. \u201cTheir natural default is to fly commercial. What you find is that a lot of fixed base operators (FBOs) are way faster, and in many cases, cheaper than commercial, if you can fill the plane. It gives you so much more freedom when you travel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based in Duluth, Minnesota, Cirrus Aircraft is an aircraft manufacturer renowned for its whole-airframe parachute recovery system\u2014the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System\u00ae (CAPS\u00ae)\u2014and recognized as having revolutionized general aviation for modern aircraft pilots. As of 2018, the company had delivered over 7,000 SR aircraft to customers in just eighteen years of production and has been the world\u2019s largest producer of piston-powered aircraft since 2013.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe have a nearly 50% market share, so we\u2019ve taken great advantage of our position and size in the market,\u201d Nielsen said. \u201cRight now, it\u2019s really about building out what I refer to as a 360 experience around the customer. What else can we provide in addition to selling them the plane? Can we provide service? Can we provide maintenance and hangar support? Can we create an app that allows the user access to the plane from anywhere?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dominating the market<\/h1>\n
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Cirrus Aircraft made its name through creating the SR Series aircraft, comprising the SR20, SR22, and SR22T. In 2017, the company began production of the Vision Jet, a single-engine, very light jet, for which they already boast a 20% market share. In total, Cirrus currently produces around 400 SR Series planes a year and about 100 Vision Jets, and enjoys 50% share of the light aircraft market as a whole.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere are really three or four ways that we\u2019re thinking about growth right now,\u201d Nielsen explained. \u201cOne is how many more markets we can be in. We\u2019re primarily a North American company today, but we also have a pretty good European business. The way the market ebbs and flows in Europe depends largely on the regulation of airspace. Also, the further away you get from western markets, the more scarce the raw materials, such as SPOs and access to fuel, are. As those markets open up, we will see added opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cirrus has multiple locations in North America, including Grand Forks, North Dakota; Knoxville, Tennessee, and a brand new service facility in McKinnet, Texas. Nielsen currently sees considerable opportunities in connecting Cirrus\u2019 businesses around the world through advances in IT and the standardization of operating procedures, as well as offering services and maintenance for its aircraft as the number of Cirrus aircraft owners grow.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe have more than 7500 owners of our planes today somewhere in the world, and there\u2019s a whole ecosystem you can build around that,\u201d he elaborated. \u201cYou have to have really good arrangements with your suppliers to make sure that you don\u2019t run out of parts, but also that you can supply the spare parts for years to come after you launched the plane.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Collaborating with suppliers<\/h1>\n
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Nielsen views the role of Cirrus\u2019 suppliers and partners as not only assisting in the construction of airplanes, but also collaborating on solutions to design and manufacturing challenges which help to push quality and innovation in the aviation industry forward. \u201cThe whole industry is really built around very small production runs where you might only make 500-600 pieces of a given item,\u201d he explained. \u201cThe way planes are made is you choose the engine and you build the plane around the engine, and you need to understand what the engine can actually lift.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou also don\u2019t want to build an engine that\u2019s too expensive or too heavy that you can\u2019t sell the rest of the plane with it. However, if you can work with your partners on roadmaps that are 10 years out, you can really do something interesting together.\u201d Nielsen used Cirrus\u2019 longstanding relationship with Garmin Aviation, a world-renowned producer of avionics solutions, including navigation and radio solutions, to illustrate how the company\u2019s suppliers play a key role in co-developing technology used by Cirrus to set it apart in the aviation industry.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe production of an airplane really starts with two things\u2014the avionics, and the engine,\u201d Nielsen explained. \u201cGarmin has some fantastic hardware and we have a really good understanding of what a flight deck should look like, what is relevant for the pilot, and how to remove what we call pilot workload\u2014which is to say, how to make flying easier. With our engineers working side by side, we\u2019ve come up with some really interesting stuff.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt also gives us the opportunity to be first to market with a specific software solutions or something unique to our plane. What matters in establishing these relationships is whether you can make commitments to your suppliers, on anything from exclusivity to certainty of supply.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Nielsen believes that several elements are necessary to persuade more people to take the plunge and fly their own planes. Safety is first and foremost. Later comes the issue of user friendliness\u2014the flying experience itself, and a more comfortable ride for the pilot and passengers\u2014all of which Cirrus is seeking to improve on as it aims to promote the concept of personal flying as a reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the whole industry, we have a challenge in that the population of pilots is shrinking,\u201d Nielsen highlighted. \u201cThey\u2019re getting older, and there\u2019s fewer of them. And then, it\u2019s simply not a profession that many people are going into. Our first task is to help create more pilots, get more people into flying, and explain to businesspeople that their life is going be significantly better if they fly themselves rather than taking commercial.<\/p>\n

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\u201cOnce they understand how easy it actually can be with the right instructor and the right curriculum to become a pilot, they realize it\u2019s amazing. First, we\u2019ve got to create pilots, then we\u2019ve got to make it safe and convenient and affordable for them to fly. If we do that, I\u2019m confident that we\u2019ll continue to have a bright future ahead of us as a company.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zean Nielsen, CEO of Cirrus Aircraft, believes that the future […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":23999,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,43],"tags":[1196,99,1385,3014,3013,1079,2156],"class_list":["post-23998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-executive-interviews","category-management-leadership","tag-aviation","tag-ceo","tag-ceo-northam","tag-cirrus","tag-cirrus-aircraft","tag-executive-interview","tag-printed-issue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23998"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26501,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23998\/revisions\/26501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}