The REAL cost of owning a Cirrus Vision Jet

The Cirrus Vision Jet is a really impressive aircraft... on paper. It's got a range of 1,275 nautical miles; that's the equivalent of Melbourne to Ali Springs, London to Greece, even New York to Dallas. It can cruise over 310 knots. It's got state-of-the-art Garmin avionics, really good safety features, and it's actually really simple to fly.

But if you did have a spare 2 to 3 million USD to spend on an aircraft like this, what are actually some of the considerations and costs when it comes to actually owning and operating one? I wanted to find out a bit more about the Cirrus Vision Jet, and luckily my friend Philipe, when I was back in Europe a couple of weeks ago, he had a Vision Jet that needed to be delivered to a new location for maintenance. He asked me if I wanted to come along, so of course I said yes.

But what's the mission today? Well, we're bringing a Vision Jet to a maintenance center Y, and we have a little paint work to do and scheduled service, so no big deal. But that maintenance center is in Germany, near Munich, so we have to get to Alburg, is the name of the town. Alburg. Okay, is this routine Echelon air stuff? You get to fly nice jets to amazing places?

I mean, yeah, kind of. I mean, amazing place like a service center in Alburg? Well, we're trying to take some friction out for our owners, right? So, you know, if the owner's busy, I mean the owner of this one is in another country at the moment, so we're just flying it over to Oxburg service, and then we'll commercial at home.

And what's our flight time roughly today to Munich? How long does it take you? It should be about an hour and 45 to hour 50. So they're fueling at a few, I guess, and doing all that stuff. And then we're going to jump on board, and then straight line to Munich, that's the idea.

Well, yeah, unfortunately, it's a curved line. Oh, curved line. All right, Euro control, it's yeah, Euro control routing isn't straight on this one, but hey, it's cool—more time in the air, more time in the air in the clouds! I can't wait! I've been lucky enough to have actually flown a Cirrus Vision Jet a little while ago when the G2 version came down here to Australia for a demo day.

Flying a jet, man, don't believe it looking great! Now, as a pilot of a Cirrus SR22, which is this aircraft here, it's actually a relatively straightforward transition from this piston single-engine aircraft to the jet. In fact, the newest model of the SR22—this is a version G3—but the G7 version, which came out earlier this year, has actually got some identical components with the Cirrus Vision Jet.

For example, the power lever in the G7 is the same physical power lever that's used in the SF50. The control stick follows a very similar design with the recessed push-to-talk button and the ergonomic grip. And most noticeably, the cockpit itself with the Garmin screens, the touchscreen controllers, and the operation and layout of the avionics itself is almost identical between the Cirrus SR22 G7 and the Cirrus SF50 Vision Jet.

So, whilst there is a great deal of familiarity between the aircraft, it's still exciting for pilots like me who traditionally only ever really fly piston single-engine aircraft to jump inside a very impressive Cirrus Vision Jet. Well, this is quite the upgrade.

Yeah, all right, so we've just been refueled, fed down there, and Philip's done all the checks for the aircraft. Everything's looking great! I love sitting in one of these things; it just feels like you're some kind of rock star down here on Bigin Hill. But, T1 system test passed.

So, what powers the Vision Jet then? Well, unlike the traditional SR22 that you can see behind me, which is obviously a piston engine propeller-driven aircraft, the Vision Jet... well, it's a jet. But what is the jet that provides the power? Well, that is a Williams FJ33 turbofan engine, delivering an impressive 1,846 lb of thrust.

And the jet is actually positioned on top of the fuselage, right in between. Well, it doesn't actually have a rudder and it doesn't have an elevator. The Cirrus Vision Jet's actually got something called a “rator,” which is a combination of the two, and that's what gives it that distinctive X-tail layout at the back of the aircraft.

Now, being a single-engine aircraft, just like the SR22 behind me, even though the power plant and the way it delivers thrust is completely different, the Vision Jet still has one engine on board. And you may think, "Well, then what about redundancy? What happens if something happens to that engine?" And I will come to that fact in a second.

But transitioning from a piston engine to a more complex jet engine may actually raise concerns of the whole operation being a lot more complicated for engine management and even simple things like starting up the aircraft. But it's actually far harder to start an aircraft like this behind me, especially on a hot day in the Australian desert.

Thankfully, though, in the Cirrus Vision Jet, well, they reduce that all to one simple control: fuel pump goes on, and then you just push start and release. And now you're watching the rise.

All right, so we're just waiting at the holding point now for Bigin Hill to give us clearance—probably a minute or two—and then we're going to be up and away on our way to Munich. Concentrated! So, how much would it cost then to run a Cirrus Vision Jet itself?

Well, traditionally, with things like aircraft maintenance, you do an annual inspection or 100 hourly inspection on the aircraft, and as long as there's nothing that comes up which is unexpected, you normally get a relatively similar price to what you've paid previously, and then the aircraft is released to fly again.

But then there are times sometimes when you have items which have expired, like you might require an alternator overhaul or a magneto overhaul or, in the case of a Cirrus, maybe the parachute needs repacking. And then you do have spikes in your maintenance when those unexpected or those timed items actually come up.

When you buy a new Cirrus Vision Jet, however, Cirrus have actually got a maintenance program which is valid for the first couple of years during the ownership of the aircraft. They call it Jet Stream, and it's basically a single cost that covers all maintenance on board the aircraft, irrespective of what happens to it.

Now, I had to dig in to try and find out the cost of that Jet Stream package. It's not actually advertised on their website; it's obviously something that may be negotiated specifically with owners based on the age of the aircraft, the owner themselves. But it's usually quoted to me at being something around the magnitude of $100,000 to $120,000 per year.

Now, of course, that in itself is a large amount of money, but depending on the hours that you fly the Cirrus Vision Jet, if you start to work things out, it can actually be a more affordable way to maintain and manage a jet aircraft than paying for ad hoc maintenance in the same way as you would do for something like a piston single.

So, I thought I'd do this quickly on my phone just so you can see some rough costs based on how many hours you fly per year. So, let's put in the first of all—we'll do 50, 100, and 200 hours as the amount of hours that you're flying per year. The Jet Stream maintenance, like I said, that's $120,000 per year, irrespective of how many hours you're flying.

Now, the SF50 uses Jet A1, and of course, prices vary wildly on different airports, different locations. I'm going to use $6.20 USD per gallon; that seems to be a pretty good average across America at the moment. With the fuel burn of 70 gallons per hour in the cruise, that's around $434 in fuel per hour.

So, for 50 hours per year, that's $21,700. And then we can extrapolate that across the different hours to get the total fuel cost based on the hours you're flying. Insurance then—again, that depends on the pilot experience, the age of the aircraft—but just as a real average, I found prices from about $10,000, $15,000, $30,000, $35,000, $25,000. So, I'm going to put $20,000 in as the insurance cost, and again, that would be irrespective of the number of hours that you're flying annually.

If you quickly add those ups, the totals you get then, it's about $161,000, and just over $226,000 for the 200 hours of flying. Now, if you divide that by the costs per hour—so divide that by 50, 100, and 200—you can see that the cost per hour to run, if you're only flying 50 hours a year, would be $3,234. At 100 hours per year, that's $1,834, but at 200 hours per year, $1,134.

I'm going to apply about a 20% margin of error on all of this, so the lowest base price if you take that 20% down—50 hours would be $25,000, 100 hours would be just under $112,000. But if you're flying around 200 hours per year, that actually comes down to around $97 per hour to operate the aircraft.

Now, don't get me wrong, $97 is still a lot of money, but to be honest, if you're spending that much on a private jet, if you can get something like a fixed maintenance program for at least the first maybe 3, 4, or 5 years of flying it, and if you can actually fly it for a decent amount of hours per year as well, it's not actually as much as I thought it would be.

Surface wind 10-8 knots. C take clear for takeoff. It was a pretty gray London day as we climbed out of Bigin Hill Airport, and we were cleared up into London's Class A airspace. Air Traffic Control actually gave us a series of turns to avoid other traffic in the area as we climbed up to our final cruise altitude of 27,000 ft.

But once we were out of UK airspace, it was actually pretty much smooth sailing all the way from England across to Germany. However, as we got closer to Germany, we did start to notice that there were some storm cells building up in the distance. They didn't look too bad, to be honest, but because some of these cells were looking like they were going to be embedded in the cloud, especially on our descent into Germany, we decided to turn on the onboard weather radar in the Cirrus Vision Jet just to give us a bit more visibility over those cells as we were descending through the cloud.

That added visibility really made it quite easy to navigate around the storms with a bit of help from Air Traffic Control, and we managed to avoid the worst of it before coming in for a pretty straightforward approach and landing at our destination, ready to drop the aircraft off for its scheduled maintenance.

I don't actually think it's useful to compare this Cirrus Vision Jet to other aircraft that it's sometimes put alongside, things like, you know, an older TBM, maybe an 850, a PC-12, or maybe the Piper M600. It's quite often put next to those aircraft because, you know, they're single-engine. I know that they're propeller-driven, but they're turboprop aircraft, but they're kind of all sitting in the same price bracket.

You know, the Vision Jet, it's so much simpler to operate. It's so much more advanced with its avionics. I think it serves a very different mission objective to some of those aircraft do as well. And then, of course, there's the safety features that, like the SR22s and the SR20s that came before it. The Cirrus Vision Jet is the only single-engine light jet aircraft with a whole aircraft parachute system that comes as standard, and that's a system that's actually been used in real life now on two occasions with the Cirrus Vision Jet, which has saved four occupants where the pilot on board has had to deploy the CAPS to bring the aircraft back down to the ground safely.

Again, if I had a spare few million dollars—which I've just checked, and I don't—but if I did and I was to buy an aircraft like this, well, would I get a Cirrus Vision Jet? Well, living here in Australia, particularly the south of Australia, here in Melbourne where I live, and knowing it would take me at least two fuel stops to get out of Australia into Southeast Asia. Well, because Australia is so vast, maybe there are better options if you had that money to spend to try and get something which has a little bit more range.

But then with my flying, I also fly between Melbourne and Sydney quite a lot, and knowing that you could do that just as fast—without any of the commercial delays and issues and problems and security and airport lines to fly someone like Qantas or Virgin—if you could do that in your own private jet in about the same amount of time, then that becomes really appealing.

But it's when you look at ownership in places like Europe, and the flight that we did, for example, from London to Munich in just over 2 hours, knowing that you'd be able to take friends and family for weekends away, discovering new countries, new airports, new destinations—well, that's when the Cirrus Vision Jet really comes into its own, and range no longer becomes a factor because you've got the luxury of that private jet.

You've got the ease of operation, the ease of use, the relatively, if you're using it enough, the relatively cheaper operating costs compared to some of the other jets in a similar category. Then, oh my God, yeah, if I lived in Europe and I had the money for it, there is no doubt that I would want to fly something like that.

Thanks, Philip! That was fun! That was great fun! That's a very luxurious way to travel from the United Kingdom to Germany. And then, in a week or two, it'll be ready for pick up, and you come back and pick it up?

Yeah, um, actually the owner is back in town, so he'll pick it up. I was going to see if I could get a... yeah, to Australia. Is that on offer? I mean, great thanks!

All right, flying adventure 2025! But that wasn't the end of our aviation adventure on that day. In this video, you can see some more behind the scenes of me and Philip flying the Cirrus Vision Jet, as well as another bonus unexpected, unplanned, and rather rain-soaked aviation experience that we had on that day.