Mid-Size Jets

When you think about U-Haul, you probably envision a small or medium sized truck used for personal moving. But this week, the company took delivery of one of the most advanced business jets on the market – the Pilatus PC-24. Featuring an orange paint scheme reminiscent of the design on the easily identifiable trucks, the […]

__Continuing a trend that is sweeping business aviation, Hawker Beechcraft says it has developed an aftermarket retrofit kit allowing the installation of blended winglets on the Hawker 750. The modification will add 100 miles to the airplane’s range and improve time-to-climb by 5 percent, the company says. An effective increase in the wing aspect ratio […]

In many ways the Cessna Citation X is an extreme airplane. Its radically swept wing, huge wing-to-fuselage fairing and enormous vertical fin are unique in the business jet world. The X looks like it does because that’s what it took to reach the goal of being the fastest civilian airplane now in service. With its […]

With the emergence of Embraer’s two clean-sheet bizjets, the bar in the midsize world has been raised substantially.

Embraer recently revealed a number of intriguing new details on the Legacy 450 and 500, the midsize jets that it officially launched 18 months ago. The jets are still a couple of years away from first deliveries, but Embraer has already defined them in great detail. At face value, it might seem that Embraer picked […]

When I first heard that Learjet would build its new Model 85 entirely from composite materials, I wondered what management there was thinking. So far there has not been an FAR Part 25 transport airplane built even mostly from composites. And the history of turbine-powered composite airplanes is sketchy at best. The Starship, of course, […]

Hawker Beechcraft is in the odd position of having two Hawker jets in its lineup that are many generations apart. The Hawker 4000 is a high-tech, super midsize jet with a carbon-fiber fuselage and the latest in system sophistication. The Hawker 900XP is the newest version of one of the very first business-jet designs. This […]

At a web-based press conference officials of Bombardier’s Learjet division gave a progress report on the status of the company’s Learjet 85 all-composite midsize bizjet. If it succeeds, the 85 would be the first all-composite business jet to earn certification under Part 25. The program, however, appeared to be at risk with the failure of […]