THE CIRRUS VISION JET
Take the fear out of flying with a jet that can parachute to safety and land itself
We all know the saying about the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life being the day they buy the boat and the day they sell it.
Well, private jets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, either.
It may seem a little obvious, but jets are … well, expensive. For even a little Cessna or Embraer capable of business flights and family trips, you’re looking at $5 million to $10 million. Then there’s the added expense of a crew, whom you will be paying mostly to do nothing but wait around for you. (They also impinge on your privacy exponentially more than flight attendants on commercial airlines.)
Another thing: private jets are more dangerous than commercial flights, especially if the pilot dies midflight or a wing falls off due to maintenance shortcomings, which are more common in private aviation.
Wouldn’t it be something, then, if you could buy a private jet big enough for a family or a small group of business colleagues for half the price of any other similar airplane, and if you could fly yourself without much more skill or training than is required to pilot a basic propeller Cessna?
To add to all that, the U.S.-made Vision Jet, from a relatively new Minnesota-based maker, Cirrus, is almost crashproof. The Vision Jet has a massive, built-in parachute that you can deploy in extremis, allowing you to float down safely into a field or onto a highway or water. You and your passengers will most likely survive, and, if you’re lucky, your airplane may also be retrievable.
The Cirrus Airframe Parachute System has been successfully used in tests and a handful of times in real life, when Vision Jets have gotten into trouble—each time through pilot error, Cirrus says.
And there’s another safety feature that’s straight out of a comic book. If the pilot dies or is incapacitated, the closest passenger can hit a large red button on the ceiling marked “Safe Return Autoland.” The Vision Jet will radio that there’s been an emergency and proceed to land automatically at the nearest airfield, leaving the passengers free to grieve and swear off flying for good. This feature has yet to be used in real life, but it is a hell of a thing to have.
The Vision Jet is, in effect, the flying car everyone has been waiting for, which this writer has long contended will never happen. The incredibly spacious interior—all handstitched leather and suede—feels like being in a Bentley. This when private-airplane interiors are traditionally beige and disappointing in every way.
Unlike many private planes, whose small windows make it unexpectedly difficult to see out, the Vision Jet has some of the largest windows in the business, so passengers can take in the world below. There is also Wi-Fi and pull-down entertainment screens for the kids in the back.
According to all who have piloted it, the aircraft is exceptionally easy to fly. Cirrus recommends learning on one of their earlier turboprops, then moving up to the jet. The cockpits and controls are deliberately identical. The propeller version, the SR Series, also has the all-important parachute and the oversize windows. They come in at well under $1 million, and there’s a lively secondhand market.
Drawbacks to the Vision Jet? It’s not very fast, and the range on a full tank is quite limited—typically, it’s good for a trip about the distance of New York to Miami or London to Nice. So crossing the Atlantic would require refueling stops—this is why one British tycoon has a Vision Jet on both sides of it.
I should add: it helps to be relatively continent—there is a rather primitive bathroom option (disposable urinals), but holding it seems like the more dignified option.
THE FUJIFILM GFX100RF DIGITAL CAMERA
Take professional-quality photos with this straightforward point-and-shoot
It will not have escaped the loyal reader’s notice that your columnist is a Leica fanatic. But this extraordinary new camera from the never-to-be-underestimated Fujifilm not only competes with Leica’s best offerings in every area (superb looks included) for a lower cost, it also does things no Leica can.
The GFX100RF is a large-format digital that has the same size sensor as a Hasselblad. This huge, 102-megapixel sensor produces, as you would expect, unbelievably good, spectacularly detailed photographs. I was able to see single hairs on a subject’s head from across a busy street. Fuji was originally a film manufacturer, and their software enables you to choose from a wide variety of beautiful film effects.
While the GFX100RF is a chunky camera that you can’t get into a pocket, it is a fixed-lens device, making it better suited to street photography than studio. It weighs about the same as the Leica Q3 but produces the image quality of a Hasselblad, which weighs nearly double with a lens on it. The Fuji also costs around $1,400 less than the Leica Q3. A Hasselblad with a lens will cost nearly twice as much as the GFX100RF.
There is no real sense, however, in which the Fuji feels cheaper. Case in point: the shoulder strap tends to be a rather shoddy afterthought for most cameras. The strap that comes with the GFX100RF, though, is an excellent rope that feels secure and is the most functional and elegant I’ve come across.
THE FLARE DEFINITION
These ear inserts tune out loud noises so you can hear what’s important
Even among smart, literate people, there is a phenomenon I call scientific shamanism—when dubious or often nonexistent science gives rise to dodgy practices and beliefs.
In the audio field, as in medicine, there are intelligent people who will spend thousands of dollars a foot on speaker cables and believe they can hear the difference between those and regular, $5-a-foot wires.
There is a tiny audio company I have great respect for, called Flare Audio, based in a seaside resort on the south coast of England. They produce some superb headphones and built the audio system in one of the world’s best-sounding movie theaters, Olympic studios, in Barnes, West London. Flare has dozens of dedicated supporters among audio professionals, and it is run by really good people.
Nonetheless, Flare has been widely accused of scientific shamanism with their latest product: modestly priced, non-electronic ear inserts that the company claims reduce sound distortion and tangibly enhance music or, say, speech across a table in a noisy restaurant. The product was called Immerse in prototype but has recently been launched as Definition.
Flare has testimonials for Definition from music-industry professionals who swear by them. On the other hand, I have discussed these tiny earbuds with other sound recordists who regard them as the purest snake oil. “They’re just earplugs,” one tells me.
I was inclined to agree at first, but I have—albeit reluctantly—now warmed to Flare Definition. I am sensitive to harsh noise and recently wore them at a soccer match that was so exciting, and the crowd around me so loud, that my Apple Watch was warning me that the sound had hit 100 decibels, which is dangerous to the ears. However, I was comfortable and able to hear everything my friend next to me was saying.
The same evening, I wore them at an overly loud concert and was able to listen to the show with the sound and the rough edge reduced.
So I don’t know. They may be nonsense or glorified earplugs, but their source is impeccable, they seem to do something for me, and even if you don’t think much of them, they are not a huge investment.
TV GARDEN
Tune in to television stations from abroad and see what the world is watching
Last summer, I alerted you to the most distracting thing I have ever discovered online, a free-to-use Web site called Radio Garden. It lets you listen to hundreds of live radio streams from across the world.
Well, now there’s an even more diverting Web site: TV Garden, which does the same, but with hundreds of TV stations.
If you are looking for a way to procrastinate at work, or to while away time in an airport, there is surely nothing to compete with this. As I write, I am flitting between a folk-music channel in Albania; a cooking show on La Sentinelle TV, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; an entertainment show on Yulduz Usmanova, from Tashkent, Uzbekistan; and the evening news on Somali National Television, in Mogadishu.
It is impossible to tear oneself away. I am beside myself with joy.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology