AOA sensor grounds Cirrus jets
The FAA last month grounded all 117 Cirrus Vision SF50 jets through an emergency AD prompted by Cirrus reporting three incidents on its Model SF50 of the stall warning and protection system (SWPS) or electronic stability and protection (ESP) system engaging when not appropriate.
Cirrus senior vice president of sales and marketing, Ben Kowalski, said the manufacturer immediately began working with the FAA and the company’s internal teams to determine the root cause of the problem.
“We proactively and quickly issued two service advisories and one mandatory service bulletin to ensure our operators were up to speed on the issue and to remind them of the proper flight manual procedures to follow in case of an angle of attack (AOA) related issue,” he said.
“We quickly identified the root cause as an AOA sensor hardware issue, not a software issue.”
Cirrus has issued service bulletins requiring operators to replace their AOA hardware sensor and, along with a prescribed AOA hardware preflight inspection, allowed 5hr flight time to reposition the aircraft for this maintenance.
The Cirrus CEO said the AOA hardware unit was not manufactured correctly by the supplier. “Cirrus Aircraft installed the unit correctly in the aircraft, but the unit we installed wasn’t built to its design specification.”
- Report by John King.
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