by Isabel Goyer

Last year when Bend, Oregon, company Columbia Aircraft exhausted its last gasp efforts at getting enough cash to stay in business and declared bankruptcy, there was immediate speculation that Cessna would buy the company’s assets at auction. As it turned out, Cessna had been looking at that possibility for some time already. And by the […]

Since its certification back in 1994, the hallmark of the remarkably successful Pilatus PC-12 turboprop single has been its tremendous flexibility and utility — with a cabin full of passengers and cargo, it can go from a cozy dirt strip to the city lights a thousand miles distant, flying far above the terrain and much […]

**** It’s been almost 10 years since Austrian manufacturer Diamond Aircraft launched its all-composite four-seater, the DA40 Diamond Star, as a follow-on to its successful but payload-limited Katana two-seat trainer. I went to the Diamond factory in Austria back then to fly and photograph the Diamond Star, though I have to admit that based on […]

If you had listened to critics sounding the death knell of the turboprop some years back, you might have thought that the Cessna Caravan would be a museum exhibit by now. Competing, as it seemed to be, against every imaginable kind of airplane-jets, turboprop twins, pressurized singles, even piston singles-how could Cessna’s big nonpressurized turboprop […]

When Piper announced back in early November that it was going to produce an unpressurized, roughly $750,000 version of its Mirage six-place pressurized piston single, the reaction from the media was, well, downright tepid. At face value it seemed as though Piper was merely trying to lower the price point of its million-dollar-plus, cabin-class, pressurized […]

A decade ago when Piper introduced its new single-engine turboprop, the Piper Meridian, nobody was quite sure what to make of it. How would it coexist in Piper’s lineup with the popular pressurized piston single Malibu Mirage, on which the Meridian is based? And perhaps most importantly, would a new, expensive-to-develop turboprop single save Piper […]

The plan was simple. I would be transitioning from an unpressurized, high-performance single to a Piper Meridian. While I have a little experience in turbine airplanes, the idea was for me to make the leap in a week and to get to the point in that short time where I could handle the airplane on […]

See the PiperJet proof-of-concept under construction Piper’s single-engine jet, seen here in real-life and in an artist’s rendering, is working its way through development. The company says that despite some changes to its design, the airplane is still on track for certification by the end of 2010. I recently visited the Piper factory and was […]

I swapped frequencies on the 430 and made my call to the controller. “Austin Departure, Cirrus Two Four Seven Sierra Romeo out of one-point-six for 4,000, one-five-zero on the heading.” “Cirrus 247SR, roger, climb and maintain 4,000. And Seven Sierra Romeo, uh, we have you down for 25,000 feet for your final altitude. Is that […]