Living the Cirrus Life, with Todd Simmons

By John Zimmerman
Aug 13, 2024
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Pilot's Discretion Podcast, episode 84

A quarter of Cirrus customers are not pilots when they buy their airplane. Todd Simmons explains how the company succeeds with these non-pilots, including their focus on enabling a lifestyle instead of just selling specs, providing a complete ownership solution, and tackling safety head-on. Todd is also a passionate backcountry pilot, so he talks about the risks and rewards of that type of flying, including what he learned from being involved in a serious accident. In the Ready to Copy segment, Todd talks about the power of social media, the most important skill for safe taildragger flying, and which college football team in Georgia is best.

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Quotes:

The Cirrus focus: “The number one goal we have is increasing participation and engagement in aviation.”
What the Cirrus Life means: “That airplane is enabling the rest of their life. That’s what winning looks like.”
Choosing the right standard: “We’re not necessarily looking to aviation as our benchmark, but quite frankly we’re looking well beyond aviation.”
Selling the total solution: “The airplane is only one piece of the equation. The ecosystem that it lives in is actually more important… that is the essence of the Cirrus life.”
Using the parachute and autoland: “If the plane breaks, pull the chute and if the pilot breaks, push the button.”
Why CAPS didn’t improve safety at first: “It wasn’t a hardware problem, it was a ‘software’ problem - and I mean software as a human interaction problem, and a training and teaching problem.”
Why new technology matters: “When you make it simpler and easier to fly - simpler is safer.”
Safe backcountry flying: “Go slow to go fast. Go slow to understand airplane performance. Go slow to understand density altitude."
The joy of taildraggers: ”I encourage anyone wanting to get into the backcountry—it is incredible… my airplane has taken me to places I could never have otherwise gotten to.”
How to use new media to promote aviation: “You’ve got to reach people on their terms.”
Busting a Cirrus myth: “We chose to put it on the airplane and we’re dang glad we did.”