Cessna Looks Back On 2005, Ahead To 2006

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Not to be outdone — by a wide margin, in fact — Cessna Aircraft Company also listed its 2005 results and looked ahead to 2006. Among the highlights at Cessna were delivery of 249 Citation business jets, 822 single-engine piston airplanes, and 86 Caravan single-engine turboprops. The company says it racked up total orders for 788 jets and 1,198 single-engine piston and turbine aircraft, worth a total of $6.3 billion. It also obtained FAA certification for two new jets — the Citation CJ1+ and Citation CJ2+ — and, in our gilding-the-lily department, type certification of the Garmin G1000-equipped Skyhawk. In 2005, Cessna announced the Citation Encore+ (first customer deliveries expected in February 2007), and continued developing its entry in the coming very light jet sweepstakes, the Citation Mustang.

Two milestones Cessna reached in 2006 worth mentioning include delivery of the 6,000th single-engine piston airplane since production restarted in 1996 and delivery of the 1,500th Caravan turboprop. Looking forward, Cessna says it plans to deliver between 295 and 300 jets in 2006, a 19-percent increase over the 249 jets delivered in 2005. If you want one, we hope you placed your order some time ago, since the company says it is essentially “sold out” for 2006 business jet production, and has a nearly identical number of orders for 2007. Certification of the Citation Mustang is expected in late 2006. There are currently more than 230 orders for the Citation Mustang, selling out production of this model into 2009. Since the company was established in 1927, more than 187,000 Cessna airplanes have been delivered throughout the world and the global fleet of more than 4,500 Citations is the largest fleet of business jets in the world.

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