The 1932 Piper Cub sold for $1,300 and embodied everything Bill Piper thought an airplane should be: affordable to own and operate, simple, rugged and fun to fly. You can land it in a short farm field, a small lake or a tiny patch of gravel in the middle of a river. For many a bush pilot today, the Piper Cub remains the ride of choice for these reasons. There’s no drama here.
Flying » Used Business Aircraft Review
February 1, 2012
The Bell 407 reminds me of a Mercedes Sprinter van. It's a vehicle with amazing versatility that can be used for virtually any mission: ambulance, cargo, law enforcement, firefighting, military scout and gunship, offshore oil support, utility and, of course, executive transport.
November 29, 2011
The idea for the Cessna Citation Excel was not new: Combine light jet economics and runway performance with a comfortable, stand-up cabin. For the Excel, Cessna stuck to its time-tested potion of evolutionary development based on simple and robust systems.
In other words, it went to the parts bin.
October 1, 2011
High-performance piston aircraft don't like operating much above 18,000 feet and to get them to do so you have to outfit them with temperamental accessories such as superchargers, turbochargers and intercoolers that are prone to break, shorten an engine's useful life or both.
August 1, 2011
Morphing a commuter jet into a bizliner is no easy task, but Embraer has succeeded with the Legacy 600. The aircraft is based on the wildly successful and rugged EMB 135, a 37-seat commuter jet. When introduced in 2002, the Legacy offered a simple value proposition: a capacious cabin on par with that of a Gulfstream GV–and for half the price. Today, used Legacies are an even bigger bargain.
June 1, 2011
The protagonist in the 1970s American television show The Six Million Dollar Man was an injured astronaut who’d had various mangled body parts replaced with bionic ones that gave him superhuman abilities. All of this is recounted in the show’s opening credits, while the narrator enthusiastically intones, “We can make him better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster!”
April 13, 2011
At the request of the FAA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week stayed a proposal that would have prohibited the 'certification, manufacture, importation, sale or
April 1, 2011
You may be a VIP, but if you've flown on executive helicopters, you've likely had to sit knee-to-knee with other executives on perches better suited for horse jockeys. Even the slick Sikorsky S-76-in production since the 1970s and widely considered the gold standard for corporate rotorcraft-can seem a bit confining with six adult male passengers aboard.
February 1, 2011
The uber jet's rarefied air was new territory for Bombardier when it announced the long-range, large-cabin Global Express in 1991. Bombardier's challenge to Gulfstream's dominance of the market for large corporate jets was fraught with perils that would show up on early-production aircraft nearly 10 years later.
December 1, 2010
When Bill Lear created the Learjet in the early 1960s, he envisioned a small, fast and simple airplane, a concept the marketplace embraced. His 20-series and the slightly elongated 30-series aircraft that followed sold briskly for more than 20 years, until long after he had left the company.
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