Cessna MustangAs the world’s leading builder of business jets with more than 5,000 Citations delivered, Cessna is accustomed to success. But even in that family of winners, the Mustang stands out. The Mustang achieved every performance guarantee Cessna made when it announced the program, and it accomplished all of that exactly on schedule. We can’t think of another clean-sheet airplane design that has matched or exceeded every speed, runway length, range and payload goal initially, and to do all of that on schedule is exceedingly rare. The Mustang also received almost immediate certification from the European authorities, another very unusual accomplishment. And pilots and operators have responded, placing more than 350 orders for Mustangs as Cessna ramps up production to perhaps as many as 100 for 2008.
For proving that the lowest priced, most accessible Citation ever has lived up to and exceeded all expectations, we make the Mustang a Flying Editors’ Choice for 2007.
Garmin WAAS GPS NavigatorsGarmin was founded by two avionics engineers – Gary Burrell and Min Kao – who envisioned in 1989 how GPS could revolutionize our world. It is fitting that their company, which has been a leader in delivering useful and usable GPS technology for all manner of activities, would also be first to introduce wide area augmentation system (WAAS) performance enhancement to business and personal aviation on a wide scale. WAAS technology guides pilots with extreme precision over the earth, but also has the accuracy and signal integrity monitoring to provide vertical approach guidance to within feet of the surface. Garmin offers WAAS precision in all of its new GPS navigation systems, but more importantly also offers upgrades to the more than 90,000 GNS 530/430 systems it has already delivered.
For making the precision and safety potential of WAAS available to all levels of aviation, we salute Garmin with a 2007 Flying Editors’ Choice Award.
