Cirrus Vision Jet versus the Eclipse Jet - Which one is better?

[Music] ok today we're going to compare the eclipsed jet and the Cirrus vision jet first off they are both great airplanes and kudos to Cirrus as a great a va ssin company and marketer to bring more pilots into the owner pilot jet world now one key takeaway is that the vlj very light jet world is a great step up for anyone flying a a piston or a twin so welcome to the jet world and I hope this video can be helpful in your decision making now full disclosure I do regularly fly in a clip jet so I might be a little bit biased here but you'll see that I love both planes and each one has a distinct advantage over the other in certain categories in a nutshell I think the Cirrus wins on avionics anterior and the Eclipse wins on performance and cost I do think there's a winner but you'll see that at the end so here the categories we're going to look at ramp appeal interior avionics performance economy service and support and safety and the goal is to go in order of least important to most important in making a decision okay the first category for comparison is a ramp appeal might sound a little trivial but a lot of people buy planes based on how they look so you got to pay attention to it the cirrus vision jet has a very distinct look it's got that v tail it looks very unique on the ramp and some people compare it to you know looking like a fish which I don't think the positive thing meanwhile the Eclipse jet has a really classic look a twin-engine jet airplane that looks more like a miniature you know business jet I think the Eclipse winds on this one and next the interior the Eclipse is a really classic interior kind of what you're used to it up in a private airplane meanwhile the Cirrus has got a really sort of modern really space-age with a sleek look back to the Eclipse you know it's either a six person or a five person configuration really comfortable for four or five six will fit but you know it's just really classic the Cirrus vision jet looks like a spaceship it's got big windows it's kind of very modular seating configuration will seat up to seven actually and people love the visibility in the cirrus vision jet so I'm gonna actually give the vision jet the winner here in the interior category and now onto avionics they both have great panels being a slightly newer airplane the Sears will have some extra bells and whistles but there's a lot of configurations for the Eclipse and upgrades that have been done so that even even the original eclipses now have Garmin touchscreen avionics packages if you want them both airplanes can shoot LPD approaches they have wasps GPS is a dsb weight and balance automatic v speeds fadec engines so fully computer-controlled engine operations auto throttle but the Cirrus does have some additional features such as synthetic vision and the pretty cool Garmin Auto land feature so if you stack the two planes next to each other you know they both have fully functional modern avionics packages but the Cirrus will have a couple more bells and whistles that ultimately in the avionics category does make it the winner okay now I'm to important stuff performance I mean we do own these airplanes to actually go somewhere so in the performance category there really is a standout and that is the Eclipse you know there's a saying in aviation that paws always want to go farther faster and higher and the Eclipse chat with its twin-engine Jets does just that so let's look at some key performance metrics and we'll compare the g2 version of the Cirrus to the Eclipse so first everyone's favorite speed so the winner here is the Eclipse topping out at 375 knots compared to an advertised 300 plus knots for the Cirrus vision jet there are reports of the Cirrus vision jet going as fast as 315 even 320 knots if conditions are perfect and you will hit that 375 knots for the Eclipse jet again if good perfect range is about the same the g2 version of the Cirrus really boosted the Cirrus is range so that it generally matched the eclipsed jet so these are pretty similar now service ceiling this is a big one and those who fly jets often really appreciate how important is to be able to go high why you want to top the weather you want to get into really fuel-efficient environments and you want to be away from all of the rest of the traffic the airliners so service ceiling is something to really put a heavy weight on and in this case the clips Chet wins big time by climbing up to flight level 4 1 0 vs. flight level 3 1 0 for the g2 of the Cirrus candidly that that reminds me more of a of a turboprop than it does a jet so in fact if you cluster the airplanes together and you sort of look at the Cirrus jet versus the eclipsed jet you'll see that the Cirrus jet really fits in with the turboprops in terms of speed and altitude whereas the Eclipse kind of lives up there with the rest of the the jet category and then even though that Eclipse goes 50 knots faster it actually is more fuel efficient you know it gets better miles per gallon the the Eclipse at 6.6 nautical miles per gallon versus the Cirrus at 4.9 again that goes back to the altitude the plane operates at and because of that the the Cirrus has to carry more gas so the the Cirrus fuel capacity is 2,000 pounds versus the Eclipse at 1700 pounds and yet the range of the two aircrafts are almost identical this series just uses more gas lastly your takeoff weight and your payloads are pretty similar between the two airplanes so when yet all up in terms of the performance differences between the airplanes you know the Eclipse really is a jet airplane it's a twin-engine jet it flies high it flies pretty fast it goes pretty far and it really is an airplane that you can count on to go from point A to point B whereas the cirrus vision jet truly is more comparable to a turboprop so the winner in the performance category is definitely the Eclipse all the way around okay now I'm to coffin economy because these are after all Business Machines and we've got to justify the expense so the way we're going to do this is we're gonna look at two hypothetical owners one owns and eclipses one owns a Cirrus and they're both going to do the same flying in a given year the key for fair comparisons to not look at ours flown because speed impacts that but instead look at trips conducted and if you compare apples to apples on trips conducted you can get a fair comparison on cost operator so first we got to buy the airplane the the Cirrus owner is gonna spend a little more because it's a newer airplane two and a half to three and a half million dollars we're gonna use three million dollars for our economic model and the Eclipse owner you can get a good eclipse for less than a million dollars you can spin up to two naff million we're gonna assume 1 million dollars for our model today so we're assume both owners make a trip from Santino Colorado to San Francisco three times a month roundtrip that's 831 nautical miles each way the Cirrus owner will put on two hundred eleven hours per year the Eclipse owner one hundred eighty four hours per year difference of course is because of the speed advantage of the Eclipse house we used for flight to download performance data from both airplanes and compared the two if you look at these hypothetical trips going from denver to san francisco it's a three hour and 21 minute flight they're in the Cirrus and a two hour and 49 minutes flight they're in the Eclipse it's a thirty two minute differentials it Clips being faster the differentials a little bit smaller on the return because if a headwind turns to a tailwind net-net DVD round trip is about 0.7 seven hours faster for the eclipse look at the fuel burn fuel burn for the Cirrus is almost 2,800 pounds and the Eclipse is approximately 2100 pounds that's a 25% fuel advantage for the Eclipse measured in dollars at three dollars and fifty cents per gallon you save 361 dollars on the round-trip for the Eclipse versus the Cirrus and he'd look right at the bottom the serious owner will have spent four hundred and sixty six thousand dollars in one year doing those flights back and forth of San Francisco that Eclipse owner will have spent two hundred and thirty three thousand dollars a savings of two hundred and thirty two thousand dollars per year for the Eclipse owner it's also a lot cheaper on a per hour basis and if you look above at each line item for expenses this is based on about a thousand hours of experience flying in Eclipse and yes it is correct that the engine cost per hour is about the same between the two airplanes even though the Eclipse has two engines and the Cirrus one it's because the predator Whitney engines on the Eclipse are cheaper to maintain if we pull away the value depreciation and the cost of capital to create more of a direct operating cost version of this spreadsheet then the Delta between the two obviously changes and tightens but still the Eclipse owner has spent a hundred and thirty nine thousand dollars in direct operating costs this Cirrus owner 181,000 the Cirrus sorry the Eclipse owner saves forty two thousand dollars in a given year for approximately a hundred dollars per hour so I think it's obvious that if you're looking at best economy for operating a very light jet and you're an owner operator the Eclipse is going to be a big winner in this category saving hundreds of thousand dollars in ownership costs per year now in terms of support and maintenance this has historically been a weak place for the Eclipse because of the instability of the parent company but thanks to some new independent companies that are providing maintenance and parts there's been a great improvement in the reliability and the part supply for the Eclipse and I would say it's quite satisfactory but let's just face it the Cirrus you know marketing and corporate machine is sophisticated and put together and first-class so the reality is when it comes to service and support the Cirrus will win from a safety perspective the Cirrus obviously has the parachute which is known for all serious airplanes have the pair and the new innovation from Cirrus and Garmin is the safe return or autoland capability where the airplane will land itself at a push of a button clearly that's very cool but of course the Eclipse has two Jets two engines and you know if you're crossing the Rockies or maybe flying at night you really want to have two jet engines I think in order to feel safe and secure up there and then of course the other real benefit of the Eclipse is the service ceiling you know flying high flying into the mid and high 30s means you can cross weather and you're not kind of stuck down there with all the precip all the icing all the turbulence you know at 31,000 feet or below and the Cirrus you're still going to be a situation where you're gonna be having to choose between penetrating weather or doing a big deviation around it and you know there's a safety consideration as it relates to you know being in that tough situation so in all I give it a tie in this category so who's the overall winner well the winner is you for making the decision to get into a very light jet as an owner-operator the safety the economy the performance of this category of aircraft is one that really warrants a lot more pilots getting into it and so I think again they're both great aircraft and you know series has sold some 7,000 aircrafts they've done a great job of getting new people into aviation but I think when you stack them all up to it next to each other if you're really looking for a plane that's gonna get you from point A to point B reliably and at a really economical price you cannot beat the Eclipse jet and so I deem that the overall winner but again both great airplanes and have fun and fly safe

Channel: Rob Holland

Views: 156,519

Rating: 4.7057962 out of 5

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Id: zA0nDVcFD14

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020