Russia set out in the mid 1980s to replace the Tu-154 trijet with something that burned a third less fuel and needed one less crew member, and the Tupolev Tu-204 was the answer. A twin-engined narrow-body of broadly Boeing 757…
Gates Learjet announced the 50 series at the 1977 Paris air show as three aircraft, the 54, 55 and 56, and only the 55 ever reached production. First flight came on 19 April 1979, deliveries started in 1981, and 147…
Bolting the Longhorn wing onto the Model 35 fuselage gave Learjet the fastest-climbing light jet of its generation without the cost of a clean sheet airframe. Delta fins went under the tailcone, the tip tanks came off in favor of…
Four engines on an 85-seat airliner never made commercial sense, which is close to the reason the RJ85 outlived the economics that killed it. A high cantilever wing, a T-tail and a two-petal airbrake in the tail cone bought short-field,…
Fokker built 47 of these between 1994 and 1997 before bankruptcy closed the line, which makes this one of the rarest jets still earning a living. Alliance Airlines in Australia holds most of what is left, with smaller fleets in…
The light business jet category starts here. Bill Lear built the Model 23 on the bones of the FFA P-16, a Swiss ground-attack fighter that never reached production, keeping its thin high-speed wing and turning the rest into a six-passenger…
Put both engines on the centerline and an engine failure stops being a handling emergency. That was the premise behind the Skymaster, a push-pull twin with a tractor engine in the nose, a pusher behind the cabin and twin booms…
Cessna’s first turboprop was built to fill the space between its cabin-class piston twins and the Citation, and it ended up outrunning most of the turboprop competition. With two Garrett TPE331 engines, a pressurized cabin for six to nine passengers…
More American pilots learned to fly in a Cub than in any other airplane of its era. Piper built the tandem two-seat taildragger in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, from 1938 to 1947, and its fabric-covered steel-tube airframe, 65 hp Continental and…
Speed per gallon has always been the case for the MU-2. A Marquise cruises at around 295 KTAS on roughly 74 gallons an hour for both engines, faster on less fuel than most cabin twins of its era, and it…
Three lifting surfaces, two pusher turboprops and a cabin close to stand-up height make the P.180 Avanti the most recognizable business aircraft on any ramp. Piaggio designed it to fly at light jet speeds on turboprop fuel burn, and it…
Russia’s first all-new airliner after the Soviet era was built around a Western supply chain, and that choice defined both its rise and its stall. The Superjet 100 is a five-abreast, 87 to 103 seat regional jet with full fly-by-wire…
Inverted flight was out of reach for the Citabria line until the 7KCAB arrived with fuel injection and an inverted oil system. Certified in December 1966 and built first by Champion Aircraft and then by Bellanca, it turned a tandem…
Few certified airplanes fly as slowly, or leave the ground as quickly, as the Courier. Automatic leading edge slats, large slotted flaps and a geared Lycoming turning a big propeller let it hold controlled flight near 30 mph and work…
Owning a jet used to mean hiring a crew and paying for a flight department. Cirrus Aircraft set out to remove that barrier with the Cirrus SF50 Vision Jet: one Williams FJ33 turbofan, a carbon fiber airframe and a whole-aircraft…
Few aircraft of any era match the Mustang’s combination of range, speed and staying power. North American Aviation completed the prototype airframe 102 days after the contract was signed in 1940, hung a Packard-built Merlin on the design three years…
Cessna took the retractable-gear 210, fixed the legs down, widened the mission and cut a pair of clamshell cargo doors into the right side of the fuselage. The resulting Cessna 206 Stationair has spent six decades hauling freight, jumpers, survey…
Dutch industry never built a larger airliner than the Fokker 100, and the type has now outlasted the company that made it by three decades. Fokker stretched the F28 Fellowship by 5.7 metres, hung a pair of Rolls-Royce Tay turbofans…
Composite construction, a bubble canopy, and glider-derived aerodynamics made the Diamond DA20 one of the most recognizable two-seat trainers of the past three decades. This low-wing single, first flown in 1991 and built in Canada from 1994, carries a student…
Announced alongside the super-midsize Praetor 600 in October 2018, the Embraer Praetor 500 pushed the midsize class further than it had gone before, pairing full fly-by-wire controls and a six-foot stand-up cabin with the longest range in its segment. Built…
