19 Facts About Klapmeier brothers

The Klapmeier brothers were inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2014.

The Klapmeier brothers started Cirrus in the basement of their parents' rural dairy barn near Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Alan and Dale Klapmeier brothers grew up in DeKalb, Illinois and attended DeKalb High School.

The Klapmeier brothers frequently built model airplanes as young children and rode their bicycles to local airports.

Larry and Carol were entrepreneurs who founded a successful nursing home near Chicago, at which the three Klapmeier brothers worked as kids doing janitorial chores during the 1960s and 1970s.

Klapmeier brothers once said that his fall-back plan was to become a banker had their early career in aviation never succeeded.

The Klapmeier 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.

Towards the end of 1991, the Klapmeier brothers began to question their goals and started thinking about their lifelong dream of getting into the world of certified aircraft.

Around this time, the Klapmeier brothers had the roles of Alan traveling around the country looking for investors and raising the capital Cirrus needed to certify the SR20, and Dale staying back at the factory overseeing operations by keeping the design, testing and production moving.

Klapmeier brothers was originally set to locate its headquarters in Brunswick, Maine, but after complications with state tax credits, Alan decided in 2012 to move manufacturing operations to Superior, Wisconsin, where they received a better financial package.

Klapmeier brothers flew three new Vision SF50 conforming prototypes and employed over 800 people in 2014, having hired more than 300 of them in the past three years.

The Klapmeier brothers have both served on numerous aviation boards and programs.

Klapmeier brothers is currently on AirSpace Minnesota's board as its founding chairman and the advisory board for the Aircraft Kit Industry Association.

For much of the 2000s, Alan was part-owner of Bluewater Yachts, a central-Minnesota boat manufacturing company that the Klapmeier brothers' uncle founded in the 1970s, with the slogan "Different By Design".

Klapmeier brothers has been involved in the charity flight organization Angel Flight West.

The Klapmeier brothers received the Living Legends of Aviation award in 2007 at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, California.

British business magnate Alan Sugar said that he admired the Klapmeier brothers for starting Cirrus from "virtually scratch", and for their use of technologies like ballistic parachutes, glass cockpits and manufactured composite airframes.

Besides Lance Neibauer of Lancair, who delivered nearly 600 Columbia-series aircraft, the Klapmeier brothers are the only kit-makers to ever successfully transition into the design and production of certified aircraft.

Since 2022, the Klapmeier brothers are featured in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum along with a 2003 Cirrus SR22, the first piston aircraft with a full glass cockpit.