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 time of the inevitable fire sale in November of 2007, Cessna was ready to make its move. The Wichita manufacturer’s $26.4 million offer won the day and earned Cessna the business, including the type certificates to the naturally aspirated Columbia 350 and the turbocharged Columbia 400, as well as a new niche in a market that it had aspired to for some time.
And the acquisition gave new life to a pair of marvelous single-engine designs and signaled an important change in strategy for Cessna, an 80-year-old company that had previously developed every one of its hundreds of certified airplane designs in house.
