The look gets you right away.

That lone engine mounted like a jetpack on the plane's back. The V-tail like something off an F-117, allowing the stream of hot exhaust to pass right through. The aircraft's cool teardrop shape and its sprawling windows.

As we take off from Westchester and zip in a loop around New York City, no less than three people on the radio ask just what the heck this bird is. It's the Cirrus Vision Jet, and it demands your attention. A dream decades in the making before actual development began in 2008, the Vision saw its first production model take off last year. Now Cirrus is ramping up the production line to satisfy the 600 pilots-to-be on the waiting list to purchase this $2 million plane.

Andrew Moseman

With this emphasis on sex appeal, the Vision looks a little like the Icon A5 we flew on a similar route down the Hudson River a couple of years ago. You can see it in the big windows meant to enhance the wonder of flying, controls that are more like an intuitive car dash than a confusing plane cockpit, and a cabin full of luxury leather seats and USB ports.

But the Vision Jet is a step up in ambition. Whereas the $200,000 A5 is a toy for the well-heeled, a pure joy-flying machine, the Vision is a proper regional jet that could seat up to seven people and carry them a thousand miles or more, making trips such as New York to Chicago possible. And yet even at a price tag of $2 million, the Cirrus comes in well below the cost of typical corporate jets that ferry America's titans of industry. One of the wisecracking pilots on the radio wonders when it will "grow up into a real plane." The Vision, though, is right where Cirrus wants it.

Andrew Moseman

"This is James Bond, Tony Stark-type stuff," says Ben Kowalski from Cirrus marketing, and the company does seem to be targeting a certain type of rich guy or secret agent—the one who wants to fly his own damn jet, thank you very much. As such, the company built Vision to be flyable solo. You don't need to hire a flight crew to take you to your next shareholders' meeting, golf outing, or daring mission to thwart a supervillain. One pilot can do the job because of the plane's clever autopilot system and smart features.

Much of this happens through a customizable interface of infrared touchscreens, built by Garmin. Two bigger screens show a pretty intuitive map (for the amount of detail) of your airspace, as well as your airspeed and altitude and relation to the horizon. Punch in your destination airport on the keypad, and the map displays helpful route guidance to point you the way. Once you reach the goal, autopilot can line up the jet with the angle of the runway and bring you in nice and neat, handing control back to the human pilot's joystick for the final few moments of landing. A host of automatic stability adjustments and safety monitors are there to prevent the plane from going too crazy to traveling too slowly and stalling. (I also like the LVL button—push it when you're in trouble or confused and the plane automatically levels out its pitch and its wings).

The Vision tagline is "the world's first single-engine personal jet," and that single engine explains a lot about what makes this plane so unusual. A one-engine jet, which was a dream of the Wisconsin brothers who founded Cirrus back in the 1980s, is now possible thanks not only to advances in engine tech but also because of carbon fiber composite construction. The single-piece fuselage is strong enough to allow those bigger windows, not possible on normal business jets made of multiple aluminum pieces, but light enough to let the Vision weigh in at just 3,572 lbs. empty and travel up to 1,380 miles at 276 mph (it'll get up to 345 mph if you don't mind shortening the range).

Andrew Moseman

Using one engine rather than two means lower manufacturing costs, lower fuel costs, and lower maintenance costs, Kowalski says. It brings down the operating costs to just $700/hour. But it also means danger. When a multi-engine plane loses an engine, it limps to an airfield for repair. When a single engine-plane loses an engine, well, you get the idea. Which is why Cirrus, over the course of decades of building and selling thousands of propeller planes, imbued them all with its Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS).

Yes, it's a parachute for your plane. Should the engine go down or the pilot be incapacitated, you can pull a red level in the cockpit and a big chute blasts away and then deploys slowly (read: not so fast that the force jerks and tears apart the fuselage). The plane coasts to the ground. Cirrus says it's saved more than a 100 occupants over the millions of flight hours the company's planes have logged. Given the danger of flying and the tendency of amateur pilots to get into trouble, it's nice to know the one-engine plane has a failsafe.

The Vision Jet's carbon fiber parts are crafted in North Dakota, assembled into a plane at the company's plant in Duluth, MN, and the plane is delivered in Knoxville, TN. That's where new owners, having completed their pilot's certification already, get nine days of training on the Vision before they're allowed to fly it for real. So far Cirrus has delivered four of these birds and is set to send out the fifth. Kowalski says the company hopes to ramp up production to 40 this year and then 100 annually.

Cirrus factory in Duluth, MN. Cirrus Aviation

For those of us who don't walk in Thomas Crowne circles, it's difficult to imagine that there are enough plutocrat aviation enthusiasts to make the Vision Jet a real product. But the waiting list is now at 600, and Kowalski says the Vision could soon find its way into businesses such as charter flights, where it will become an airport mainstay and no longer an object of pure wonder.

It's not hard to see the appeal. Coasting toward the trip's end at a couple of thousand feet above Long Island Sound, I can see the cars stuck on I-95 in Stamford, CT, and can't help but shudder at how long it would take to get from there to PM's home base, a tower among the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Our pilot, Matt, jokes about how sad it is to leave the little plane and get back on the highway. At least he gets to keep flying this thing.