Cirrus gets personal

The sunlit lobby at Cirrus Aircraft is a poor place for keeping a secret. Customer David Kidd and his wife, Tara Dayer-Smith, have come to Duluth, Minnesota, to meet their new SR22. The airplane they spent weeks helping to customize is ready—and partially visible in the adjacent hangar bay. But, for a few more minutes, it remains tucked away and off limits.

“I’m trying not to look, or act, like a 6-year-old on Christmas morning,” says Kidd, an exuberant golf course designer from Scotland who lives in Bend, Oregon. “I know I’m doing a miserable job, but I just can’t help it.”

At the appointed moment, the doorway to the hangar opens for the big reveal, and Kidd beholds an airplane whose paint scheme, colors, and interior details he and Dayer-Smith dreamed up but, until now, had only seen on computer screens. Now that it’s a tangible reality, their once-distant plans for flying on business and adventure trips seem to have arrived, too.

The hangar fills with Cirrus employees who come to wish them well, but Kidd seeks out one in particular: designer Alex Alequin, who mills quietly in the background.

Alequin, 31, is an artist whose hipster-style untucked black shirt, impeccable jeans, and pointy shoes seem totally out of place in the steadfastly non-flashy upper Midwest. The seven-year Cirrus veteran is at the center of the company’s efforts to customize aircraft, a process that can add $40,000 or more to the price of a new SR22. The company that touts the term “personal aviation” believes that, when done right, customization can tighten the bonds between owner and aircraft—and there’s no denying that the roughly 5-percent price bump helps the company’s bottom line.

The process can also create powerful ties between the Cirrus staff and their customers.

“Tremendous job, Alex,” Dayer-Smith, a professional golfer from England, tells Alequin. “You got this exactly right.”

The X on the tail is inspired by the flag of Scotland, and the numbers 386 are both easy to say—with one syllable per digit—and spell out FUN on a telephone keypad. The G for Golf requires no explanation.

The only unusual design elements are a purple accent stripe and Kidd’s corporate logo embroidered on the headrests. If the airplane is ever resold, however, the vinyl stripe can be peeled off and replaced with something more standard, and the headrests can be swapped out in minutes.

For now, however, Kidd isn’t thinking about resale. He’s effusive in his praise of Alequin’s fidelity and attention to detail.

“This represents things that are deeply meaningful to me,” the first-time aircraft owner says, “but it does so in a way that’s not garish or over the top. It’s customized, but it’s not totally tricked out, and that strikes the right balance.”

Fast and furious

Alequin approaches aircraft customization from his experience in the world of high-end cars—not aviation.

Although corporate jet firms have offered extravagant options to their elite customers for decades, that specialized work typically is performed at completion centers around the globe. Those businesses are often owned and operated by third parties, and it’s not unusual for the interior installations and one-of-a-kind paint schemes to take longer than the construction of the actual aircraft.

The Cirrus Xi program is different. Customized features are built into each aircraft on the assembly line, and all the work is done by Cirrus employees at the Duluth factory.

“This program is modeled after what you see with factory-custom cars,” said Alequin, who studied industrial design at Detroit’s College of Design Studies and worked in the automotive industry before joining Cirrus. “I pay a lot of attention to the things BMW, Bentley, and Rolls-Royce do with their customization programs, and so do some of our Cirrus customers—who also own those products. I’m not nearly as familiar with the programs corporate jet manufacturers offer.”

With Cirrus, X stands for the customer, and i is for individualized. Alequin says he strives to make each design reflect the customer’s personality, not his own taste.

The customization process begins in a conference room on the upper floor of Cirrus headquarters, where Alequin meets customers and questions them about their new airplane, what it means to them, and what it represents. It’s meant to be a free-flowing discussion, and Alequin seeks to learn about the things that motivate and inspire each customer. He also wants to know what other motor vehicles they might identify with. Do they have a favorite car, motorcycle, or boat?

As themes begin to emerge from their discussion, Alequin sketches on an electronic pad connected to his MacBook Pro. As he does so, those designs appear on a high-definition, wall-mounted screen, and customers can pick up electronic pens and modify the images they see.

“The process is meant to be fun and open,” Alequin said. “It’s an exploration. Sometimes the ideas come out fast and furious, and other times you have to be patient and ask more questions. You can’t rush through it. Usually, a theme emerges after a few hours, and then the rest is a matter of continuing to refine it.”

Cirrus produced a handful of Xi airplanes in 2013, and that grew to more than a dozen last year. The company won’t say how many customized airplanes it expects to deliver this year but hinted that the pace exceeds one a month.

Design features that began with the customization program also have found their way into mainstream Cirrus aircraft such as the top-of-the-line Accelero and Carbon models. And when Cirrus begins deliveries of Vision SF50 jets in late 2015, a customization program will be in place for them, too.

Face to face

This is a stark change from the company’s origins. “When I came to Cirrus, all our aircraft were white,” Alequin said. “The only differentiation was in the vinyl stripes. Now we’re able to offer a much broader spectrum of paint, design schemes, and materials—and that opens up greater possibilities for our customers to express themselves.”

Of course, no airplane is a completely blank slate, and there are many operational and production considerations. But Alequin encourages customers to think big and forget about limitations during the brainstorming phase. He’ll try to find workarounds later in the design process.

Alequin strongly encourages customers to come to Cirrus headquarters for the initial design consultation. (Alequin is part of the Cirrus group relocating in 2016 to Knoxville, Tennessee, where the company is building a new delivery center.)

“There’s really no substitute for meeting face to face and exchanging ideas in person,” he said. “We can always swap emails and PDFs later, but getting started really requires sitting down at a table together.”

Still, it doesn’t always work that way.

When financial manager Jason Vanclef decided on a custom SR22, he arranged a conference call with Alequin with linked computers. Vanclef is an avid surfer, and his company logo has a lighthouse theme. Alequin came up with a design that put a lighthouse on the tail with bright yellow beams of light projecting up the fuselage to both wings.

“I wanted ocean,” Vanclef remembers of the conference call with Alequin. “I wanted a lighthouse. He came up with silver and bay blue, then crafted the perfect design. I thought about it for a week, made a few tweaks, and it was done.” The yellow also is meant to make the airplane more visible in the busy Southern California sky where Vanclef does most of his flying.

The vast majority of flying Vanclef plans to do is business-related, and he said putting elements of his company’s logo in the airplane’s design will strengthen his case to the IRS that the airplane is a business tool.

“It’s like a bread truck with vinyl lettering on the side,” he said. “I’ll fly to visit clients in places like San Diego and Las Vegas, and I’ll commute home to the Central Coast on the weekends.”

For Kidd and Dayer-Smith, coming to Minnesota in midwinter for their initial consultation was essential. “I’m in the design business, so I know that success requires an idea, and the consistency to pull it off,” said Kidd, whose courses at Bandon Dunes on the Oregon coast and St. Andrews in Scotland are among the world’s most highly rated. “We came up with the themes and let the designer do the creative part.”

Kidd earned his private pilot certificate in 2013 and is pursuing an instrument rating, and Dayer-Smith recently began flight training.

“This airplane represents 25 years of work at building my career,” Kidd said. “It’s a dream to be able to have an airplane like this. It will allow us to go on adventures, make business travel more efficient and enjoyable, and it will get me home to my family more. I couldn’t be happier with the result.”

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