Cirrus VK-30

VK-30
Role	Amateur-built airplane
National origin	United States
Manufacturer	Cirrus Design
Designer	Jeff Viken, Alan and Dale Klapmeier
First flight	11 February 1988
Introduction	1987
Produced	1988–1993
Number built	about 13
Unit cost	$64,000 USD (Airframe kit without engine in 1995)

The Cirrus VK-30 is a single-engine pusher-propeller homebuilt aircraft originally sold as a kit by Cirrus Design (now called Cirrus Aircraft), and was the company's first model.

As a kit aircraft the VK-30 is a relatively obscure design with few completed aircraft flying. Its most important legacy is that the work done on developing and marketing the aircraft convinced the designers that the best way to proceed in the future was with a more conventional layout and with a certified production aircraft. Thus the lessons of the VK-30 were directly responsible for the design of the Cirrus SR20 and SR22, which have been the best-selling four-to-five-seat fixed wing aircraft in the world for the last fourteen consecutive years.

The VK-30 design was conceived in the early 1980s as a kit plane project by three college students, Jeff Viken and Alan Klapmeier from Wisconsin’s Ripon College, and Alan's brother, Dale Klapmeier, who was attending the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. Jeff Viken's wife, Sally, designed the VK-30’s flap system. Together, in the Klapmeiers' parents' barn in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin, they formed Cirrus Design as the company to produce the VK-30 (VK standing for Viken-Klapmeier).

The aircraft has an all-composite construction, and was designed to achieve natural laminar flow over the fuselage as well as the wing and tail surfaces to provide a very low-drag design—using a NASA NLF(1)-0414F airfoil. The prototype incorporated some parts from production aircraft, including the nose gear from a Piper Cherokee and the main landing gear from a Lake LA-4. The VK-30 was designed to be a five-seat aircraft from the start, which made it considerably larger than most other amateur-built aircraft of its day. It incorporated a mid-engine design, driving a three-bladed pusher propeller behind the tail through an extension shaft. The powerplant was a Continental IO-550-G developing 300 hp (224 kW).