Absolutely David. The more I started looking into Cirrus, the more history I could see. At the time this plane was at the cutting edge of technology, pushing the envelope with both the retracts and proportional-based design. Tom was world champion, and knew this design could potentially get a lot of attention. He wanted it to be the best and put a lot of time into small engineering details as we'll see later.
Tom designed his planes
around the equipment used in the model.. You can really see this demonstrated with the retracts. The nose wheel in particular seemed like it was designed as a surgical implant. Removing it required a little thought--it would only come out, (or go in), a certain way. The nose wheel pictured here was very tight. Once my friend Dr. Ed Gonzalez (who is working with me on this project), and I figured out how it was installed, it wasn't hard to do, but it took a few minutes to figure out. Imagine the engineering process involved here to allow access for installation and removal.
