Cirrus VK-30

in Baraboo, Wisconsin, c. 1988 The VK-30 design was conceived in the early 1980s as a kit plane project by three Wisconsin college students: Alan Klapmeier and Jeff Viken from Ripon College, and Alan's younger brother, Dale Klapmeier, who was attending the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. Together after college, in the Klapmeier brothers' parents' dairy barn in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin, they formed Cirrus Design in 1984 as the company to produce the VK-30 ("VK" standing for Viken-Klapmeier). The Klapmeiers first introduced the VK-30 at the 1987 EAA AirVenture Oshkosh convention in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The aircraft's first flight was made on 11 February 1988 at the Baraboo–Wisconsin Dells Airport in Baraboo, Wisconsin, by Jim Patton, a test pilot who Jeff Viken knew from NASA Langley. Kit deliveries commenced at AirVenture 1988. ==Operational history==

Cirrus delivered about 40 kits, and built four additional factory prototypes. ==Variants==

in 1997 ;Cirrus/Israviation ST50 The VK-30 was the predecessor of the Cirrus ST-50, which had an almost-identical configuration to the VK-30, but included a larger ventral fin on the tail of the aircraft, a slightly larger fuselage, and was powered by a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6-135 turboprop engine in place of the piston engine used in the VK-30. Cirrus designed and initially developed the aircraft under contract to an Israeli aircraft manufacturer named Israviation, and first flew it in Duluth, Minnesota in 1994. Isravation attempted to certify and market the ST-50 in the proceeding years but it never entered production by the company. Ultimately only two ST-50 models were built. ==Accidents==

Between 1990 and 2020, seven US-registered VK-30s crashed, with a total of ten fatalities. On 22 March 1996, retired astronaut Robert F. Overmyer died at age 59 in the crash of an Allison turbine-powered VK-30. He was testing the aircraft for stall recovery characteristics at aft center of gravity limits when the aircraft departed controlled flight. ==Aircraft on display==

in 2019 • Air Zoo, Portage, Michigan • EAA AirVenture Museum, Oshkosh, Wisconsin ==Specifications (VK-30)==