Ratings, currency and proficiency

Independent and not affiliated with Cirrus Aircraft — not a Cirrus Training Center, and no training is offered here. Nothing on this page is flight instruction or a substitute for your aircraft's POH/AFM, current official documentation or an authorized instructor.

A Cirrus is a type of aeroplane, not a rating. The SR series sits within the ordinary single-engine land privileges — but the aircraft's capability makes some of the optional things much less optional.

Learning to fly in one from scratch

That is, going from zero hours to a licence in a Cirrus, rather than learning in a basic trainer and converting later. You will see it called ab initio training, which is the same thing in Latin. It's done, and some schools are built around it.

The case against is that it's a faster aircraft with a higher approach speed than a traditional trainer, which means less time to think in the circuit, and it costs more per hour. The case for is that a student who will go on to own one avoids a transition later. Both positions are defensible; it's a conversation for an instructor who knows your situation.

The instrument rating

This is the one that matters. A well-equipped SR22 is a genuine cross-country machine, which means it will readily take you into weather that a VFR-only pilot should not be in. Inadvertent flight into IMC by a non-instrument-rated pilot is one of the classic fatal scenarios in high-performance singles, and it is one of the scenarios that CAPS training explicitly addresses. If the plan is to use the aircraft for travel, the instrument rating is part of the plan.

The record is blunt about this. In the NTSB data, accidents whose defining event was a VFR flight encountering instrument conditions number ten, and all ten were fatal. It is not a common way to crash a Cirrus and it is the most reliably lethal one — see the record, counted.

Ground study that actually helps

Airspace is the part most students find hardest to hold in their head, because a sectional is a flat drawing of something shaped like a wedding cake. vfr3d.com renders VFR sectionals, airspace and terrain in three dimensions, which makes the shelves and floors legible in a way the paper chart never quite manages. runwayinuse.com is useful in the other direction — it works out which runway an airport is currently using from ATIS, wind, ADS-B traffic and NOTAMs, and shows its evidence. Both are study and situational-awareness aids: neither is a navigation source, and neither substitutes for current official charts and publications or your preflight briefing.

Staying proficient

Legal currency and actual proficiency are different things, and the gap is wider in a capable aircraft flown occasionally. Recurrent training — the manufacturer's recurrent syllabus, COPA's CPPP, or regular work with a CSIP — exists because the first hour back after three months off is not the hour to discover what you've lost. Insurers frequently require an annual recurrent flight, which is a floor rather than a standard.