12/5/2023 0 Comments Citation 10 aircraftThe new airplane would get 14 additional inches of cabin length, which would create a lot of extra legroom for the front club grouping, which would get eight of those inches. There would also be a fuselage stretch, which for the folks in back was the biggest news of all. Among many changes, it would have winglets manufactured by Winglet Technology of Wichita, a new glass cockpit manufactured by Kansas neighbor Garmin International, and autothrottles again built by Garmin. It was simply good publicity for both.īut the substantive news was that the new airplane would really be a new airplane and not a quick makeover of the former model. It was, in effect, a friendly game of leapfrog products that were not remotely competitive. By hitting 0.935, the Citation X would reclaim the “fastest bizjet” title from Gulfsream. The flashiest news was that the new X would get up to Mach 0.935, edging out the Gulfstream G650, aiming for Mach 0.925, a speed it would indeed achieve. When Cessna announced plans for the new Citation model at the National Business Aviation Association convention in Atlanta in 2010, 20 years after it first announced the Citation X, the company put on an impressive show, revealing the new plane in front of a big crowd at the Georgia Dome. Over its 18 years of producing the airplane, Cessna has delivered 330 of the original Citation X models. The cabin height is what I’d call stand-up, though that is a subjective term, of course. The wing of the X passes underneath the cabin and not through it, as is the case with many Cessnas and competitors, so the cabin floor can be lower. Headroom, on the other hand, was (and is) quite good. Legroom in the club seating areas could be less than ideal. The X offered a good cabin, though it was tight in some respects. That need is of course for speed, but with comfort, range, sophistication and more thrown in to sweeten the deal. There’s little competition for the airplane, but then again, the Citation X doesn’t fit a niche so much as a need. The wing is extraordinary, a highly swept supercritical airfoil whose sweep is rivaled among civil airplanes only by that of another very speedy model with a slightly greater payload, the Boeing 747. Its design combines low drag with powerful engines and a great wing. The secret of the X’s speed is really no secret at all. In 1997, the design team for the Citation X won the Collier Trophy, the most prestigious award in aviation at the time. The X was a big hit and immediately started setting city-pair speed records, most of which have yet to be surpassed. Moreover, it was seemingly designed for a new kind of customer, one who wanted style, power and presence while still banking on Cessna’s award-winning service. Unlike most previous Citations, it was built from a clean sheet instead of being derived from an existing model. It was aggressively styled and built for raw speed - it was the fastest non-Concorde civil airplane in the world for most of its production life and has recently reclaimed that crown. Yet the Citation X was the opposite, and its introduction was an earthshaking event in relatively staid Wichita, Kansas. When Cessna launched the airplane in 1990 the company was famous for its reliable and famously docile-handling straight-wing jets (though the X was not the first sweptwing model). FLYING exclusive offer: 7 Day Free Trial + 10% off Conklin&deDecker turbine aircraft data.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |