The fuel filler caps on the new Cessna Skyhawk 172TD aren’t your garden-variety flip-lid 100LL caps like I’d pried (or twisted) open countless times before. These babies are industrial, overbuilt Teutonic-looking things, placarded in bold letters to make it clear what kind of fuel to use: “Jet-A Only.” They seem emblematic of this new breed of Skyhawk, and I was looking forward to climbing aboard and seeing how one of my all-time favorite pair of wings would do with a new approach to power.
Cessna’s test pilots were still wringing the airplane out under its Experimental type certificate when I made my visit to Cessna’s Pawnee engineering facility in Wichita in November to sniff a little kerosene, but it was already sitting pretty, with what could pass for a production interior and panel and paint scheme and all. The airplane isn’t scheduled for certification until the middle of this year, but it sure looked ready for a customer to climb in and fly away.
