Klapmeier brothers
The Klapmeier brothers, Alan Lee Klapmeier and Dale Edward Klapmeier, are retired American aircraft designers and aviation entrepreneurs who together founded the Cirrus Design Corporation in 1984. Under the leadership of the Klapmeiers, Cirrus was the first aircraft manufacturer to install a whole-plane parachute recovery system as a standard on all its models—designed to lower the airplane safely to the ground in case of an emergency. The device is attributed with saving over 200 lives to date. From the brothers' use of all-composite airframe construction and glass panel cockpits on production aircraft, Cirrus is known for having revolutionized general aviation for modern light aircraft pilots.
Forbes magazine named Cirrus's highly popular single-engine SR-series Best Private Airplane, saying "the Klapmeier brothers built the first genuinely new plane in the sky in many years", Time magazine regarded them as "giving lift to the small-plane industry with an easy-to-fly design", and Flying magazine ranked Alan and Dale at number 17 on its list of the 51 Heroes of Aviation; they are the two youngest and highest-ranked living people on the list. In 2014, the Klapmeier brothers were inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.
The brothers started Cirrus in the basement of their parents' rural dairy barn near Baraboo, Wisconsin. Their first design, the VK-30 homebuilt aircraft, was introduced in 1987, although sales of the kit fluctuated and deliveries ultimately ended only a few years later. As the company grew they moved it in 1994 to Duluth, Minnesota, where from 2003 until his departure from Cirrus in 2009, Alan had heavy influence over the early design and development of the Vision Jet. Dale then continued the program, leading it to certification in 2016 and production in the ensuing years. The aircraft won the Collier Trophy in 2018 for representing the first jet of its kind to enter the market.
After Cirrus, Alan became CEO of Kestrel Aircraft in 2010, which merged with Eclipse Aerospace in 2015 to form One Aviation. The company ceased operations in 2021. Dale remains at Cirrus as a senior advisor and served as its CEO from 2011 to 2019.
Background
Early life
Alan and Dale Klapmeier grew up in DeKalb, Illinois and attended DeKalb High School. Their parents bought a second home in the early 1970s on a small, rural farm near Baraboo, Wisconsin. Aviation was a part of the brothers' lives from a very early age. Alan told Airport Journals in 2006 that when he was a baby, the only way his mother could get him to stop crying at times was to bring him to an airport and park the car at the end of the runway so he could watch airplanes; a tradition she continued with Dale soon after his birth as well. The brothers frequently built model airplanes as young children and rode their bicycles to local airports. When Dale reached the age of 15, he learned to fly in a Cessna 140 before learning to drive a car. Alan joined the Civil Air Patrol at age 17 as a way of receiving more affordable flying lessons. In his youth he often spoke about how he and his younger brother would one day design and build aircraft that would compete with Cessna.Family
Alan and Dale are two of three children born to Larry and Carol Klapmeier. They come from an entrepreneurial family. The eldest brother, Ernie Klapmeier, opened his own accessory store of military reenactment goods and regalia in Aurora, Illinois and managed the shop for many years since its founding in 1997; their uncle, Jim Klapmeier, and grandfather, Elmer Klapmeier, were both entrepreneurs in the boat manufacturing industry and started as a two-person company building pontoon-like houseboats on Rainy Lake, Minnesota throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Elmer ran a second business flying a "puddle jumper" plane around Wisconsin delivering parts to dairy farmers, while Jim later moved the boat project to a facility in Mora, Minnesota where he grew and retained it for several decades, transitioning into the market of fiberglass motor yachts.Larry and Carol were also entrepreneurs who founded a successful nursing home near Chicago, at which the three brothers worked as kids doing janitorial chores during the 1960s and 1970s.
Education
Alan graduated in 1980 from Wisconsin's Ripon College with degrees in physics and economics. While a senior there in 1979, he began developing sketches of an airplane that would become the Cirrus VK-30, and worked for more than three years in the Ripon admissions office while Dale finished college. The two began making foam models of the VK-30 in 1980, and in 1983, Dale graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point with degrees in business administration and economics. He once said that his fall-back plan was to become a banker had their early career in aviation never succeeded.Career
Early work
In 1979, Dale discovered a wrecked 1960 Aeronca Champ flipped over and abandoned at an airport in northern Wisconsin. The brothers then bought the plane from its owner with the very little money they had and rebuilt it in the shed at their family farmhouse. This was their first experience working on an aircraft as a self-taught restoration project, followed by the making of a Glasair I they saw introduced by homebuilt aircraft engineer and entrepreneur Tom Hamilton at the 1980 EAA Convention and Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. David Gustafson of Aircraft Spruce noted in 2012 that the only way the Klapmeier brothers' parents would lend them the money to buy a Glasair was if they wrote up a business plan explaining why constructing a homebuilt would further their professional lives.Cirrus Aircraft
1980s: VK-30, barn, inspiration for parachute, municipal airport
Soon after Dale graduated from college the brothers formed an aircraft company in January 1984, which they named "Cirrus Design" in remembrance of a summer drive they had a few years prior when they saw cirrus clouds on the horizon and wished that they were flying. Once they started the company, the Klapmeiers called upon Alan's former college roommate, Jeff Viken, to help out with their new design: the VK-30. Viken was an aeronautical engineer who eventually married another aeronautical engineer, Sally Viken, and the unpaid Cirrus staff grew to four volunteers. The Cirrus VK-30 was a single-engine five-seat composite pusher with conventional wings and tail. Alan and Dale moved into the family farmhouse to be closer to the project and began work on the airplane in the basement of the barn "down where the cows were". They all pitched in with the designing and balanced that with hands-on labor. Jeff designed the airfoil while Sally designed the flap system. The four of them would finish designing a part or a system, build it, and return to designing. Experimental aircraft innovator Molt Taylor gave the Klapmeiers and Vikens technical advice surrounding the VK-30.File:Klapmeier brothers painting fuselage of VK-30.png|thumb|left| Dale and Alan spreading resin over the VK-30's fiberglass mold in the basement of their barn, about 1985
The Klapmeier brothers would often fly their Champ from the farm up to their uncle's boat-building business in Mora to borrow tools and other supplies—such as polyester resin—for building the plane and molding its fuselage. To reduce cost, they went to different junk yards around southern Wisconsin and bought what they needed: a control system out of a wrecked Piper aircraft, a Cherokee nose landing gear to weld parts onto it and convert it to a retractable gear, and an O-540 engine they got off a scrapped de Havilland Heron. The first VK-30 slowly took shape.
In 1985, near the Sauk–Prairie Airport shortly after takeoff, Alan was involved in a fatal mid-air collision where the airplane he was flying, a Cessna 182, lost a large portion of its wing including half the aileron. The other plane, a Piper PA-15, spun into the ground killing the pilot, but Alan was able to maneuver a landing back on the runway by keeping high airspeed and using full aileron deflection. From surviving this incident, Alan sought to make flying safer—ultimately leading to the brothers' pursuit of implementing a parachute on all their designs starting in the mid-1990s.
File:Old Cirrus Design Hangars in Baraboo, Wisconsin.png|thumb|Original Cirrus Design headquarters on the Baraboo–Dells Airport
In 1986, the Klapmeiers hired their first paid-employee, an experienced welder and aluminum component designer by the name of Dennis Schlieckau. They then borrowed money from friends and family in order to build a hangar on the Baraboo–Wisconsin Dells Airport, and moved the VK-30 project from the barn to their new Baraboo headquarters with now only three other employees assisting them.
Their first display of the VK-30 was at the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh airshow in 1987. In 1988, the Cirrus team was gradually beginning to grow with nearly a dozen staff members. That year the Klapmeiers hired two of their most vital employees: Patrick Waddick, Cirrus's current president and chief operating officer, and Paul Johnston, the company's chief engineer, also known as one of their most gifted designers. After conducting multiple stress-tests on the wing, the first VK-30 prototype was ready to fly. Both Alan and Dale wanted to make the first flight, but their mother would not let them. Jeff Viken knew a test pilot from NASA Langley named Jim Patton, who made the first test flight on February 11, 1988. They sold their first few kits at EAA AirVenture later that same year. Jeff and Sally Viken left the company shortly thereafter.
At the end of the 1980s, the Klapmeier brothers approached inventor Sam Williams of Williams International about the possibility of installing a small, single fan-jet engine on the VK-30. The idea never materialized at the time, however, it would significantly inspire the design of the original Vision Jet concepts from the early-to-mid 2000s.