A dream had just come true. Cessna invited me to spend a couple days with its new Mustang. I would pick the trips that looked interesting, and do the flying on my own. Cessna’s top instructor and Mustang designated pilot examiner, Kirby Ortega, would be in the right seat to offer the occasional suggestion, and protect Cessna’s asset in case I screwed up, but, for two days, I was the single pilot in my own Mustang.
I first flew the Mustang last summer before it was fully certified, and the airplane was a delight, delivering the performance Cessna had promised. Now that the first production Mustangs are being delivered to their owners, pilots want an update on the airplane in its final form, so Cessna came up with the idea of letting me do whatever I wanted in the Mustang for a couple of days to come as close as possible to the actual experience of having my own light jet. Cessna doesn’t call the Mustang a very light jet (VLJ) because it is not really a revolutionary airplane as other VLJ makers say they will deliver, but an evolutionary airplane that builds on the nearly 40 years of experience the company has in designing business jets. The Mustang is certified to the same jet standards as the larger CJ series, for example, including all the system redundancy and engine-out balanced field takeoff performance. But because of its $2.7 million price tag in today’s dollars, and its four passenger seats, the Mustang is the most attractive Citation for the owner pilot. Some of the hundreds of Mustang orders are from corporate flight departments, but most of the jets will be flown by their owners, at least some of the time. So, for my time in the Mustang I tried to fly the kind of trips a typical owner pilot would. The trips would not be possible by any other means without spending a day or two more away from home, and none of them could have been completed in the same day without your own jet.
