Cirrus said this week that it has suspended for now its work on bringing an LSA to market. “Our interest in the project hasn’t changed,” Patrick Waddick, Cirrus vp of operations, told AVweb on Wednesday. “We are still very interested in the LSA market, and we will keep coming back to re-evaluate that decision.” The company cited three main reasons for its change of heart — the current challenging economic conditions, the fact that the SRS project requires not only development of the airplane but also an expanded flight-training strategy, and the company said it expects that with time the LSA rules and standards will “mature” and allow Cirrus to build an LSA with a broader mission profile. “While Cirrus Aircraft has made the difficult and sometimes painful decisions over the past several months to ensure longevity and proper funding of many core production and development programs,” the company said in a news release, “our total enterprise ‘bandwidth’ to keep every new program on schedule is still limited.”
Cirrus had announced at EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh in 2007 that it would produce an LSA in partnership with Fk Lightplanes of Germany, based on that company’s Fk14 Polaris model.
