by Isabel Goyer

We Fly: Cessna Citation X+

Since its entry into service in 1996, the Cessna Model 750 Citation X (it is not the letter “X” but the Roman numeral 10) has occupied a special place in the bizjet world. It put its number in the books as a sleek ­midsize jet that could rocket coast to coast in the United States […]

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We Fly: Daher-Socata TBM 900

When French company Socata launched the single-engine turboprop TBM 700 with Mooney in 1989, many observers wondered if the airplane would ever be anything more than an aerial oddity. That’s before people began to operate it and realized the many benefits of having a single Pratt & Whitney PT6 up front. That first TBM was […]

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Video: Ejection Seat Test in Cessna Scorpion Jet

At its NBAA Convention press conference last week, Cessna showed video of its Scorpion light attack jet undergoing ejection seat testing. It’s explosive footage. As I reported on my Twitter feed (@robertgoyer), Cessna plans to fly the Scorpion this year, a remarkably ambitious production schedule, and testing the seats is a critical step along that […]

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Going Direct: Personal Minimums

(May 2011) SEVERAL YEARS AGO I WAS flying with the family back to Westchester County Airport (KHPN) from Syracuse, New York, where we’d spent the Thanksgiving holiday with family. The forecast wasn’t great, but it was easy IFR, if indeed there is such a thing. White Plains was forecast to be 800 feet and 1½ […]

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Piper Mirage

My introduction to the Piper Mirage has been an unusual one, to say the least, because I came to fly the progenitor of the PA-46 line only after I’d flown all of the others, some of them a lot. Before the Piper Mirage, I’d flown three of its spinoffs, the turboprop powered Meridian, the unpressurized […]

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Half a Century of Beechcraft Barons

Sitting in the glass cockpit of the 50th anniversary edition of the Beechcraft G58 Baron, its precision-engineered Teledyne Continental Motors engines ticking away effortlessly, I’m struck by a thought: This airplane was introduced when President Dwight Eisenhower was still in office. It’s a hard notion to reconcile. With a bright and colorful flat-panel avionics suite, […]

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Quest Kodiak: Airplane on a Mission

It was a cruddy day to go mountain flying. A ragged gray overcast stretched over Western Washington State, high enough to make for good VFR under the deck near Spokane, but it promised to be a more complicated journey to the east, where the spine of the Bitterroots juts out, rising to 10,000 feet at […]

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Cage match: Cessna Cabin Class Twins versus the Piper Matrix

When I wrote my flight report/review of the new Piper Matrix, I knew I would be in for some grief. Moreover–unlike in real life–this time I knew precisely what form that grief would take. The biggest complaint would be that the Matrix was an unblown Mirage. This is largely true, but it’s funny how people […]

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Pilot in aircraft
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