Here are seven engines—and one motor—that changed the game. 

READ MORE: Rotax 912

Gnome/Le Rhône Rotary

Even by the start of the 1910s, it had long been known that weight is the enemy of flight. Power, conversely, was an airplane’s best friend. So, the quest to build ever-lighter and more powerful engines was the critical pursuit as designers around the world sought to create engines to power new, truly practical aircraft. 

Liberty L-12

The Liberty L-12, which emerged toward the end of WWI as a real player, is a fork-in-the-road product, one that marks the divergence of lower-powered engines from engines that would get bigger and more powerful. The L-12 is actually a family of engines, with six- and eight-cylinder models produced, as well. But it was the L-12, a water-cooled, V-12 engine that opened people’s eyes to the potential of gas piston engines. With an engine able to produce 400 horsepower, nearly four times that of the most popular rotary engines of the day, it became clear to designers that the future of aviation power and, hence, aviation itself, was boundless.  

Wright Whirlwind

In light aviation before the era of the air-cooled opposed aero engine, the radial engine was the dominant engine type. This is in part because United States military planners voted strongly for the type, and their hunch paid off handsomely, as a number of radial engines from relatively compact to staggeringly powerful were installed in aircraft from trainers and personal travelers to the biggest bombers. If you want to understand the difference between the potential of the engine types, just picture a radial-engine-powered Beech Staggerwing of 1945 next to an opposed four-cylinder Beech Bonanza of 1945.  

The radial engine that started a flurry of development of this still-much-beloved-but-now-largely obsolete engine type, the Wright Whirlwind was a radial engine whose development dates back to the early 1920s, when the Navy forced Wright’s hand into developing this type. It started as a nine-cylinder radial, but the company soon started building lower-power, lower-weight models of five and seven cylinders, too, for lighter aircraft. 

The advantage of the radial engine was that it was air-cooled, and with the cylinders right out there in the open, they naturally got plenty of air, which eliminated a dangerous failure mode, the loss of liquid cooling, whereas air cooling had no such risk factor; as long as you were flying, the airflow was there. 

There were disadvantages, too. Radial engines have a big footprint, so they are inherently more draggy than inline or V-configuration engines, and as they got larger and more powerful, they were forced toward larger applications, too.

Radials by Pratt & Whitney (the Wasp Junior), Continental, Jacobs and Wright itself, with its Cyclone series, were all mass produced for aircraft between the wars and, at a lesser rate, beyond, being outfitted into some of the most beautiful and prized light aircraft ever built before giving way to opposed engines and a new, more modern world of light personal flying. 

Continental A40 Piper Cub Engine

The increasingly urgent need for greater speed and payload demanded that commercial and military applications go with large radial engines or, less frequently, inline or V-configuration designs. But for light aircraft, those layouts didn’t translate well, as they were relatively heavy, complex and expensive to produce. The engines that caught on were the series of four-cylinder opposed, air-cooled models built by Continental Motors and based on the Piper (nee Taylor) Cub. The 40-hp, magneto-spark engine weighed around 155 pounds, and its compact shape made it the perfect small engine to power what would be known within a few years as a groundbreaking design, C.G. Taylor’s E2 Cub, which morphed into the much-beloved Piper J-3 Cub. 

It was clear from early on that 40-hp was passable but not ideal, so the A40 grew into ever-increasingly powerful and only slightly heavier versions, the ultimate expression of which were the 90-100-hp C-90 and A-200 models, which produced an additional 50-60 horsepower for only an additional 15-25 pounds of dry weight. 

A very similar engine, the Lycoming O-145, emerged shortly thereafter, and it, like its Continental competitors, was perfectly suited for the light planes of the day, including the Piper Cub, into which the Lycoming was also fitted. It’s hard to find details on how many of these engines were produced during their heyday, but the numbers likely are far greater than 100,000, perhaps, apiece. 

Together, the two companies dominated the light plane engine marketplace for decades, and they still provide most of the engines for new-manufacture light aircraft today, all of which are based on these original designs. 

Lycoming 540/Continental 520/550-Series Engines

It might seem odd to break off the Continental and Lycoming six-cylinder engine models from the four-cylinder air-cooled opposed models they were based upon, but their impact on light aviation has been huge. The two companies’ star engines, the 550-series for Continental Aerospace Technologies and the 540-series for Lycoming, have given developers of high-performance single- and twin-engine aircraft a go-to motor for delivering reliable power for some of the most noteworthy aircraft of the modern era, including the Beech Bonanza, the Cessna 210 Centurion and the Cirrus SR22. While conventional wisdom holds that these engines have stood still as time progressed, that’s not really true. The technology behind them, including turbocharging and greatly improved manufacturing processes, have made them more reliable and powerful over the years. 

Rotax 912

One of the most revolutionary engines in light aircraft history, the Rotax 912 has gone into hundreds of different models of certificated and sport aircraft. A four-cylinder, hybrid cooling (air and liquid) engine, the first 912, introduced in 1989, boasted 80 horsepower of smooth, efficient power that helped catapult sport aviation to another level. Previously, two-stroke engines, many of them manufactured by Rotax, ruled the segment. The company has manufactured an estimated 75,000 aircraft engines, many of them derived from their popular engines for snowmobiles. 

The 912 was launched the same year, 1989, as a new, advanced two-stroke design, the 582, which is still in production. It was the pinnacle of Rotax’s line of two-stroke engines designed for ultralight and very light sport aircraft. It has been standard equipment on more than 225 different ultralight and very light aircraft. 

Producing 65 horsepower, the engine is a tidy fit for two-seat ultralights (most of which are simply small Experimental aircraft and not technically “ultralights” at all). For those who don’t want to mix oil and fuel, the 582 features optional oil injection. The liquid-cooled engine has an integral reduction drive because its normal rpm range of power—max power is delivered at 6,500 rmp—is far too fast for prop efficiency. 

The introduction of the 582 gave developers of very light aircraft a low-maintenance, more reliable and more powerful alternative to existing small engines, and in so doing, it helped launch the Light Sport Aircraft segment and regulations. 

But it was the 912 that helped deliver on the promise of sport aviation. Since 1989, the company has developed follow-on models, including more powerful naturally aspirated and turbocharged models that today with the 915 iS go up to around 150-hp. 

The 912 is around 33% more efficient than conventional gas piston engines, and it can run on auto fuel, as well as 100LL. 

Thielert Centurion 1.7

The latest update to light GA aircraft that has had much impact was the Thielert Centurion 1.7, introduced by Diamond aircraft in its DA42 (then called the Twin Star) in the early 2000s. The engine is an extensive conversion of a Mercedes automobile engine. It was the first successful diesel aero engine, though in this case, “success” is a word to be used with numerous qualifications. 

The four-cylinder, 135-hp, turbocharged, Jet-A-burning engine has numerous advantages, but its most compelling is its great fuel efficiency, in many applications up to 40% more efficient than gas piston engines of similar power rating. It also, as you just read, uses Jet-A fuel, which is widely available around the world and in many places far cheaper than avgas, not to mention that Jet-A is naturally unleaded. And because it’s turbocharged, the engine maintains its rated power to far higher altitudes than its gas piston competitors can. 

But the introduction of the engine was a disaster, with low time-before-overhaul times for critical components, poor reliability on top of that and spotty support, at least initially, from the airframe maker. Thielert itself declared insolvency, and Diamond took the extraordinary step of creating its own engine manufacturing subsidiary, Austro Engines. Thielert engines, now much improved, are produced in the United States by Continental Aerospace Technologies, though they have not had a strong uptake rate in the retrofit market, at least not yet. But given the aero diesel engine’s promise and demonstrated advantages over gas piston engines, many still believe its day will come at last. 

Electric Engines

At least to some degree, it’s not accurate to call electric propulsive devices “engines.” They are actually “motors” because, unlike engines, they don’t produce the energy that they convert into motion. Then again, the terms have become almost interchangeable, to the point that MIT’s guidance on the subject is that the two terms are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable these days.  

The future of flight at this point looks to be electrically driven, so it would stand to reason that electric motors will be the new objects of study and fascination for pilots in the same way that Merlins and Double Wasps have been up to now. But it’s not likely to happen. Electric motors take electricity that’s stored elsewhere and translate it to a spinning prop. They are dirt-simple compared to even the most rudimentary gas piston engine. Maybe the new figureheads of aviation will be awesome new technology batteries? Yeah, that’s not likely to happen either, though it doesn’t mean we won’t be happy to have them in our lives. 

Six Modern High-Performance Piston Singles

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The reason for this brand-blind shorthand is easy. The planes that take on the weight of identity for an entire segment are icons—famous and widely produced models that for one reason or another have captured a place in the popular imagination reserved for the most special people, places and things. So, the images of speedy and luxurious Learjets in James Bond movies or olive-drab J-3 Cubs defending freedom in WW II Europe didn’t hurt their cases, nor did the 172’s mantle of most-produced plane ever. 

When it comes to household names, it’s the largely aviation-unaware households that name the tune. Interestingly enough, though, aviation enthusiasts would almost always put the same planes on their most iconic playlists, and for good reason. The planes that have reached such status are ones that have achieved remarkable feats, extraordinary fame or some other kind of cultural significance, most of which were hard-earned and well deserved. As you’ll see. 

Wright Flyer

I remember learning as a kid about the first plane ever, and I was, to be honest, disappointed. It wasn’t that I missed the significance. Its first flight was clearly a monumental achievement, not only in aviation but in world history. The disappointment was because, well, it was just so funky looking, more like a homemade parade float or Rube Goldberg paddle wheel than an airplane. Back then, I was sketching Corsairs and Comets. The Wright Flyer was nothing like them. What could Orville and Wilbur have been thinking! As it turns out, they hadn’t been privy to the 60-plus years of breakneck progress in all things aviation that 7-year-old me was. They were doing the best they could to figure out how they could possibly fly at all while overcoming the technological and materials challenges the creators of Spitfires and Electras had learned as teenagers. 

But the remarkable part of fame is that it sometimes goes hand in hand with an odd appearance. The Wright Flyer, with its solo pilot prone, face-first at the wind on a craft, wings and tails and power sources seemingly placed at random around him, cast an appearance unlike any machine people had laid eyes on before. Indeed, its odd appearance spoke loudly about the achievement of the brothers from Dayton, who against all odds coaxed a heavier-than-air contraption into the shallow sky above them. The very shape of the Flyer made it clear just how hard that was. 

Mysteries Of Flight: Who Was Really First To Fly?

Piper J-3 Cub

Probably the most iconic light plane ever, the Piper J-3 Cub might seem an unlikely candidate for the attention. After all, it wasn’t the first Piper, it’s got a number of really quirky features, and it’s not the most-produced Piper by a long shot. Yet it is the most recognizable Piper, by a lot. 

As I wrote in the introduction, for many years, “Piper Cub” was synonymous with small plane. But how did that happen? As much as I love the Cub, and I do, the model was always kind of an oddball. A pilot getting transition training in it is taught all the ways it’s so unusual. The solo pilot sits in the backseat. There’s very little forward visibility when taxiing the thing, especially if there’s a passenger up front. 

And the name of the plane, Cub, and the Bear logo belie the fact that the series—it was not the first Piper Cub—was named after an engine, the Tiger Kitten. That might seem odd to you—it did to me for years—but Tiger young are really called cubs, not kittens. So Piper got that right, and the engine maker, Brownback, got it wrong. The use of the bear logo does mix things up. 

The other big thing for the Cub is that it was successful, this at a time when the country was mired in the Great Depression. And this might be the biggest factor, though one will never know for sure: That color was a stroke of genius. A shade of yellow that would look awful on just about any other plane somehow is perfect for the Piper J-3 Cub. 

The 9 Most Beautiful GA Airplanes

Cessna 172

The most-produced airplane of all time, the Cessna 172 Skyhawk, has been such a phenomenal sales success because it was pretty good at everything and not particularly bad at anything. In other walks of life, that might have made it mediocre, but the 172 is anything but. It’s a star, albeit one that’s fine shining less brightly than some other heavenly objects. 

Still, it helped create a presence in the world of aviation for Cessna that was so great, the company’s name took over from the Piper Cub as a generic moniker for “airplane.” And let me go on record as saying the 172 isn’t solely responsible. There are a lot of other Cessnas that flew countless hours at countless large- and small-town airports over the years, cementing in the public’s consciousness the image of a Cessna as being what a small plane, any small plane, looked like. 

Cessna 172: Secrets Of The Skyhawk

Learjet

As was the case with the Piper Cub becoming a generic for “small plane,” so too did the Learjet gain fame as the universal brand name for any private jet, especially one carrying the rich and/or famous. It’s even mentioned in a song, You’re So Vain, by Carly Simon, which is one of the most popular pop songs ever. One of the lines describes how the unnamed subject, “!flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia, to see the total eclipse of the sun,” the idea being that the person she’s singing the song to—Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and David Cassidy have all been mentioned as possible subjects, though Simon refuses to say—is too rich. The year the song was written and recorded, 1971, is also the year that Learjet introduced its Model 25, later known as the Model 35. But the plane that spawned the legend was the original Lear 23, which we see as the first true personal jet. Fast and sleek—it was, after all, modeled after a Swiss fighter jet—the Lear exuded wealth and privilege. Frank Sinatra was a big supporter of the brand, though sadly, his mother was killed in the crash of a Lear 24 into the side of a mountain near Palm Springs, California, in snowy and icy weather. The safety record of early Learjets was terrible, but it’s likely that that the crashes, and the headlines they generated, were part of the allure. 

Last Learjet Ever

North American P-51D Mustang

While there were other iconic American-made aircraft that saw service during World War II—the Boeings B-29 and B-17, the North American B-25 and the Chance Vought Corsair spring to mind—the undeniable icon of the conflict was the North American P-51D Mustang. Not only is it widely regarded as being one of the most beautiful aircraft of all time, but it also has great historical significance as well, entering the war late in the game. But because of its great speed and range compared to the other fighters of the day, Republic P-47s and P-38s, both of which were largely supplanted by the P-51D, its powers were superior. The subject of range was critical. Because the P-51 could fly all the way to targets in Germany and back to base in England, it was the first fighter capable of providing nonstop protection for the bombers it was escorting. That point would have been moot had the Mustang not been a great air combat fighter, but it was, accounting for an overwhelming percentage of the shootdowns of German attack fighters. Because of its contributions to bringing the fight to Germany, the P-51D took on an elevated, almost mythic status even as it fought in combat, a sure sign of an icon in the making.

North American P-51 Mustang Gallery

Boeing 747

Upon its introduction in 1970, the Boeing 747, the original jumbo jet, was a sensation. In an era where bigger was better, it was the biggest airliner by far. Capable of carrying more than 350 passengers on two decks, the 747, with its distinctive hump, sold well, though the routes it most typically flew were longer, overwater routes. A good part of the credit for the 747’s iconic status was courtesy of Boeing and its customer airlines, which effectively positioned the jumbo jet as a luxury experience and even equipped some with piano bars to drive home the point, in essence turning the type’s brand vulnerabilities into strengths. For operators, the sheer size of the plane might not have been enough on its own, but the 747 was also fast, around Mach .85, substantially faster than its competitors. The result was, the 747 could cut a substantial amount of time from long routes.

Boeing 747: 50 Years, 50 Amazing Facts

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

If there was an award given for sexiest airplane alive, it pretty much could go to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird every single year. What does it have going for it? What doesn’t it have? The Blackbird is the fastest air-breathing airplane ever, its sleek and space-age profile exudes the exotic, and its secret development and operations gave it the whole package. And speaking of exotic, Lockheed had to get fancy to make the SR-71 even possible. The innovations included the extensive use of titanium, a stealth-like small radar cross section, and loosely fitted joints between panels to accommodate the expansion of the components as the aircraft heated up while flying very fast. The big jet famously leaked jet fuel on the ramp because of this odd design feature. Although other roles were envisioned for the jet, it quickly became a reconnaissance aircraft, the best in the world. No Blackbird was ever shot down because of the plane’s combination of speed, up to Mach 3.5, and altitude (up to 85,000 feet), allowing it to simply outrun the surface-to-air missiles the Soviets launched at it. The Air Force retired the SR-71 in 1998, but during the intervening quarter of a century, its fame has only grown, and its legendary shape says it all. Icon.

SR-71 Blackbird: An Appreciation

Top 25 Planes Of All Time

Gulfstream G-V

If Simon were to write her mega-hit You’re So Vain today, or really any time in the last 25 years, the plane mentioned would be a Gulfstream, not a Learjet. The large-cabin, purpose-built Gulfstream twinjets are the epitome of luxury, even though they have formidable competitors from Bombardier and Dassault Falcon Jet. So, it doesn’t really matter that the plane country music superstar Dierks Bentley refers to in a big hit song, the Gulfstream “G6,” is a model that doesn’t exist. The name Gulfstream says it all. The company makes sure of that. With its cutting-edge R&D, the next-gen Gulfstreams just keep getting better and faster and rangier. The G700, which features four separate living areas, can cruise up to Mach .90, and at its long-range cruise speed of Mach .85, it can fly 7,500 nm. And make no mistake about it: Gulfstream understands that its customers sit in the back of this plane, and it has spared no expense at finding ways to make the cabin experience as luxurious as the nearly $80 million price tag of the plane implies it would be. With its quiet, comfortable ride, the G700, which features the biggest windows in its class, is everything the richest of the rich could desire!and then some. 

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1. Rockets

Rockets. While rockets using black powder predate 1,000 C.E., when early chemists in China chanced upon the substance, the development of a really useful rocket engine happened in the 1920s. After that, the technology took off, largely thanks to developments in the United States, where Robert Goddard used a more effective nozzle technology to vastly improve the power and, hence, usefulness of rockets, which would eventually propel spacecraft and take people to the moon. Rockets have also powered the fastest and highest-flying airplanes, including the first to achieve Mach 1 in level flight, the Bell X-1.

2. Control Interface

On that chilly December day in 1903 when the Wrights’ Flyer launched on that famous first 12-second journey, Orville, the world’s first PIC, operated a very different set of controls than we’re used to today. Instead of a single integrated mechanism to give the pilot control of two of the three axes of flight (pitch and roll), while lying flat on his belly, he operated the elevator lever with his left hand, and the wing warping, for both bank and yaw, with his hips. The Wrights were making progress backward, as it turned out. By 1903, there was already a single control interface, designed by Austrian Wilhelm Kress, that mixed the input for pitch and roll in a way that would be intimately familiar to modern pilots. Indeed, regardless of how they’re implemented, modern controls, whether center or side stick, yoke, control column or side yoke, pretty much do the same thing in slightly different ways, and Kress had it figured out by the turn of the century—the last century, that is.

3. Ailerons

Speaking of controls, the fiendishly complicated aileron, French for “little wing,” predated the Wrights by around 35 years. In theory, the interconnected control surfaces, one on each wing’s trailing edge, deflect airflow in order to bank the aircraft (though in practice it’s a little more complicated than that). Despite the prior art (mentioned above) a few years after they first flew the Flyer, the Wrights successfully patented the concept of banking control and sued numerous aircraft makers who, well, everybody who made airplanes, as the Wrights’ patent made developing planes of most imaginable control mechanics impossible. The patent required rivals to pay the Wrights exorbitant fees for the license. Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss came up with the hinged aileron in response, and eventually the brothers set more reasonable use terms.

4. The Modern Fuselage

Even today, the fuselages (the body of the aircraft, to use an automotive term) of some aircraft in production rely on a primitive structure, a skeletal frame with a covering skin, one type of which is often referred to as “tube-and-rag,” for the metal tubing that makes the structure and the treated cloth covering it. The skin itself isn’t really necessary. Many ultralight and light-sport aircraft skip the skin part altogether and fly with bare tubing. But by as early as the mid-1910s, a more modern design emerged—the monocoque fuselage, a design in which the skin itself is a structural member. We think of today’s modern aircraft, like Cessna singles and twins, as having “monocoque” fuselages, but in truth they’re semi-monocoque designs because the skin, while serving as a critical structural element, is supported by an internal skeleton. There are true monocoque designs (or close to it) flying today, including Cirrus aircraft, which can largely skip the internal supports due to their inherently stiff composite (fiberglass and/or carbon fiber) skins.

5. Opposed, Air-Cooled, Direct-Drive Piston Engine

The history of the aircraft engine is a busy one, with numerous successfully fielded types, everything from electric motors to rockets. There are turbojets, turbofans, turboprops, V-configuration engines (like the famous Allison and Packard models of WW-II fame), in-line versions, rotary models (in which the cylinders turn with a single shaft) and radial models, with fixed cylinders arrayed in a ring. But by number, the most important engine design by far is the opposed, air-cooled gas piston engine. This design, developed in the 1800s for boats, is perfect for airplanes, as it allows for big cylinders, air cooling (though single-row radials are superior in this characteristic), balanced operation and a single propeller drive shaft that turns at relatively slow speeds for optimum propeller efficiency. By the 1930s, engines of this design had supplanted radials and inline engines in most light GA applications, and by the end of World War II, they were the de facto standard in light planes. The two most successful manufacturers, Continental and Lycoming (the two most famous names in light aircraft engines), have each produced hundreds of thousands of opposed, air-cooled gas piston aircraft engines for light aircraft.

6. Pressurization

By the early 1800s, balloons were making ascents so high that today’s regulations would require the crews to use supplemental oxygen. But making a practical pressurized gondola was complicated, so attempts were largely abandoned in favor of what we now think of as spacesuits. Airplanes were slower to mature. In fact, for a quarter of a century after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, few gave much thought about pressurizing the cabins of light planes. They simply didn’t fly high enough to warrant it. But as engine technology advanced and planes could fly to altitudes without enough oxygen for a human to survive, the need became clear. The first successful flight of a plane with a modern pressurized cabin was in 1921, when an American test pilot flew a Dayton Wright USD-9A equipped with an experimental pressurized cockpit. The first commercial pressurized airliner, the Boeing 307, wouldn’t emerge until 1938, though only 10 were built. During World War II, the high-flying Boeing B-29 had a pressurized flight deck, and by the late 1940s, pressurization became the norm, with aircraft like the Lockheed Constellation and the star-crossed de Havilland Comet being among the first aircraft in their class with pressurized cabins.

7. Instrument Flying

At the birth of powered flight, it wasn’t at all obvious that some day airplanes would need to figure out the complications that clouds present. But before long, looking at clouds and the complexities that both sides of them presented was an issue pilots couldn’t ignore. As cross-country flights became a thing, aviators had to figure out how to get around them, which is how scud running was born. It was also how dying while trying to scud-run was born. But what were the options? What about flying in the clouds? That was the crazy idea a few visionaries, including the future air racing champion and war hero Jimmy Doolittle, came up with. It was in 1929 that Doolittle first flew a plane solely by reference to the flight instruments, which were largely invented for just this purpose. Today, we assume the planes we fly can be flown in instrument conditions, thanks to the work of Doolittle and others nearly 100 years ago now.

8. Swept Wings

With the invention of No. 9 on our list, the aircraft jet engine, planes got faster and faster until designers had to reckon with what was and still is popularly referred to as “the sound barrier.” Pilots take delight in making fun of this term, but in many ways it’s accurate. By the early part of the 1940s, propeller-powered aircraft were already pushing the limits of subsonic flight, and aeronautical engineers had figured out that propellers, because of aerodynamic limits on how fast they can spin, were one of the big hurdles. Jet engines, they correctly reasoned, would solve that issue. The other problem was wing design. So wings themselves were soon given very smooth flow (laminar) wings to help them maintain lift. At speeds approaching the speed of sound, wings also encountered controllability issues due to the compressibility of the air. By the mid-1930s, German engineers were pioneering very fast swept wing aircraft, like the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, which started seeing action near the end of WWII and was the fastest airplane in the world for nearly 10 years. Ultimately, the combination of effective laminar flow airfoils and swept wings allowed fight speeds to advance from around 600 knots to better than Mach 2 (around 1,350 knots) in the matter of a few years.

9. Turbojet/Turbofan

In some ways, these are two separate breakthroughs. By the mid-1930s, designs that incorporated all major concepts and components of modern turbojet engines were being developed independently by Frank Whittle in England and Hans von Ohain in Germany. Before the end of the war, there were a handful of jet aircraft that entered production, but only the Me 262 was produced in any numbers. But by the war’s end in 1945, jet engine design had come so far that just a few years after the end of the conflict, the fastest piston-engine fighters in the world were obsolete. By the 1950s, with the introduction of the de Havilland Comet, the jet-powered airliners could fly higher, faster and with far greater engine reliability. The introduction of the turbofan engine—ubiquitous in today’s air transportation world—improved jet engines in numerous ways, making them orders of magnitude quieter and more fuel efficient than their turbojet predecessors.

Aviation Breakthroughs: Aviation Lasts

The post And Then This Happened: Nine Ground-Breaking Aviation Innovations appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

AA-5B Tiger

There’s no top of this list of planes they totally need to bring back, but if there were, the Tiger would be right up there. The four-seat, all-metal, roll-back canopy low-winger was one of the greatest accomplishments of the late Jim Bede’s aircraft design legacy. It was revolutionary—its unassuming looks fool people into thinking it’s plain vanilla, but it’s got a free-castoring nosewheel, bonded wing skins and lightweight, expanded-aluminum airframe structures. And it flew great. Introduced by American Aviation of Yankee fame, the AA-5 first flew in the summer of 1970 and had its first keys tossed to a customer the next year, but the first model called the Tiger hit the airways a few years later. By then, it had gotten the correct engine, the 180-hp Lycoming, which gave it the kind of Skylane-level cruise speeds and sprightly climb performance that made owners fall in love with it. I flew one for a few years. It might be my favorite airplane ever. Nostalgia, perhaps, but it’s a great ride. Surprisingly roomy, visibility to die for, low maintenance costs and a great instrument platform. No fewer than five different companies have signed up to build the Tiger after their predecessors shut the hangar doors. It’s currently not in production, and with 3,282 built over 35 years (with several long pauses along the way), there really aren’t that many out there. Bring it back! 

Beechcraft V-35 V-Tail Bonanza

Some Bonanza fanatics think that there’s no such thing as a Bonanza without a V-tail. The original Bonanza was, indeed, a V-tail model. Introduced in 1947, it was light, fast, modern and easy to fly and is arguably the most revolutionary light plane in aviation history. And for the next decade and a half, if you wanted a Beechcraft Bonanza (and we are not counting the Twin Bonanza), the V-tailed Model 35 was the sole menu item. Straight-tail “Bonanzas” started showing up in the early ’60s, and there are so many arguments to be made as to why that configuration is an improvement over the V-tail. Models 33 and 36 are each more stable than the forked-tailed version. They have better safety records, there are fewer structural problems with their tails, and the tendency to Dutch roll is gone. But the V-35 is just so beautiful. It handles like a bobsled on a smooth and fast track, it’s beautifully appointed and, from an aesthetic perspective, it’s just the coolest. A real work of art in the hangar. But it hasn’t been around since 1982, when the last one rolled off the line from Wichita’s east-side airplane maker. Don’t expect a resurrection anytime soon. Beech built an enormous amount of Bonanzas over the decades, more than 10,000, in fact, and many are still flying. But wouldn’t a brand-new Bonanza be the best? 

Varga Kachina

Here’s one you might not be familiar with, and if that’s the case, it’s certainly understandable. Between the plane’s introduction in 1948 and its last hurrah in 1982, fewer than 200 of the comely little tandem two-seaters hit the sky, and most of those were built between 1975 and 1982. A lot of them are still flying, probably right around 100 of them, and it’s easy to see why. The thing is just the cutest little bug of a plane you’ve ever seen. At the same time, it’s also got this strangely military feel to it, probably because it resembles in general configuration, down to its straight-standing tail, the Beech T-34 Mentor that, make no mistake, is way more airplane than the Kachina. That said, the little Varga is a joy to fly, and I flew one years ago. On its not-so-little 150 hp or 180 hp Lycoming engine, it climbs great, and the visibility is spectacular, which is handy for spotting make-believe bogeys at your six, and the handling is beautifully harmonized. Fast, it is not. But, c’mon, is fast what this kind of airplane is all about? Besides, when they bring it back, which they most assuredly will not do any time soon, they will certainly improve the aerodynamics and make it aerobatic, as well. We can dream, can’t we?

Cessna 177 Cardinal

When Cessna brought back its greatly abbreviated lineup of single-engine planes in the mid-1990s after a 10-year hiatus, perhaps the omission that most grieved enthusiasts was that of the Cardinal, which is arguably one of the, if not the, most beautiful Cessnas ever built. Introduced in the late ’60s, the Cardinal was intended by Cessna as a replacement for the 172, which sounds like a bad joke today. It didn’t work, and Cessna built many thousands of 172s after that, but by gum, the Cardinal was much beloved by those who owned and flew them. Don’t get the wrong idea. It was far from a niche offering. Cessna built more than 4,000 in the decade following the type’s introduction in 1968. And it was cool, with its two major features being the cantilever high wing and the setback of said wing, both of which allowed easy access to the seating area. And Cessna did a great job with the interior as well. It was comfortable and had terrific visibility, but it wasn’t fast, with a cruise speed of around 120-125 knots. Even the retractable-gear 177RG isn’t much faster than that. And if you note the Cardinal’s passing from production in 1978, seven years before the company pulled the plug on the rest of its singles, you might get the idea that it wasn’t selling well. Correct. Though Cessna did, indeed, get a lot of low-pressure urging to put the plane back into production, the all-metal model wasn’t cheap to build—cantilever-wing designs tend to require lots of production hours compared to their strut-braced brethren. And in a way, Cessna almost did bring back the Cardinal, or at least a Cardinal wannabe, when it floated the idea of a high-winged, no-strut, all-composite plane it called the Next Generation Piston (NGP). It never took off, production-wise, and as far as beauty is concerned, it couldn’t hold a candle to its sheet-metal inspiration. 

Cessna 210

Early 210s were a work in progress, but once they got the cantilever wing, the classic Centurion body and the big motor, they were and are simply an outstanding aircraft. If Cessna had modernized the 210 and maybe even thrown in a chute to appeal to the prospects who buy Cirrus SR22s, might it have been a contender instead of sitting out the last 36 years in retirement? Are you kidding—of course it could have been a major player. The 210 has it all. It has a prodigious payload, terrific true airspeeds, the turbo model is a beast, and the plane is both capable and a pretty one. With its updated glass panel, as so many existing 210s are sporting today, who wouldn’t have wanted one? Yes, it would have been expensive. At the same time, isn’t it in the same class as the SR22, but with a couple more seats, or the Beechcraft G36 Bonanza? Instead of resurrecting the Centurion, Cessna opted for buying a composite airplane program, the Columbia 350/400, which it probably saw as a cheaper-to-build airplane and one that better appealed to modern sensibilities. I don’t know. I’ve got a good bit of time in a 210, and it’s one of the very best airplanes I’ve ever flown. Let’s bring it back. 

Commander 112/114

Of all the planes featured here, the Commander, and perhaps the Tiger, are the ones most likely to make it back to production, though neither’s chances are all that great. Like the Tiger, the Commander, launched by Rockwell Aircraft at the dawn of the ’70s, was ultimately produced in decent numbers. Around 1,200 of the four-seaters made it out the factory doors. Like the Cardinal, the Commander incorporated not new ideas so much as ideas that few existing singles were making use of. In the case of the Rockwell single, this feature was cabin size. It’s a roomy plane from an era when rubbing shoulders with other pilots was a literal expression. Book numbers for the Commanders are among the most ambitious in aviation, but with its 260 hp (some were turbocharged), the roomy, cruciform-tailed Commander could do around 150 knots at cruise. Early models were payload limited—it’s fuel or passengers; you decide—but the aesthetics and quality work inside and out were among the best in the biz. A very solid cross-country and instrument platform, the Commander was good at doing just what it was designed to do, though everyone wished it was about 15 knots faster. With the new production ones we’re imagining as we write, we are certain that this concern will be addressed.

The 9 Most Beautiful GA Planes

The Ugliest Light Planes (That Only Their Owners Find Beautiful)

The post Six Light Single-Engine Planes They Totally Need to Bring Back! appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

The history of light plane aviation might seem like a steady arc from Kitty Hawk to Wichita (and beyond), but nothing could be further from the truth. Even at the beginning, the creation of what we now think of as the light aviation segment was hardly a given, and even once it had achieved some kind of nascent status, it faced a series of obstacles that threatened its continued growth toward an activity that offers the average person remarkable opportunities and powers. 

In fact, along the way, the future of light aviation was threatened by a number of events, both beyond our control and entirely of our own making, the outcomes of which were anything but a given, the results of which could just as easily have been an aviation world in which personal flying was far more restricted than it is today or, perhaps, absent altogether. 

Striking in their scope and variety, these challenges started pretty much from first flight and have persisted throughout the history of light general aviation, even to this day. Here are some of the big hurdles we faced in getting to where we are today and that we today face in forging a future for this amazing pathway to the skies. 

We Got This. (They Didn‘t, Really.)

It’s important to remember, before and for a time after the Wrights launched down their sandy path, that how people perceived flying and what its future might be were far different from how we understand it today. There were no Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs), no FAA to guide development. No concept of shared airspace. Even those in the midst of the discovery did not yet comprehend the challenges of flight that every private pilot applicant today knows by rote and, soon thereafter, through experience. Remember, too, that aviation had been an experimental field for well more than a century at the time of Wrights.

That was perhaps the biggest takeaway. The pioneers of flight were beginning to understand how difficult it was to get a powered airplane even briefly into the sky and how life-threatening a proposition that was. A big part of the problem was how little even the flighterati understood the nature of aerodynamics and the ways in which flight controls might be designed and manufactured to address those physical realities. Volumes could be written about the struggles these designers had in even wrapping their heads around something that even moderately knowledgeable aviation types today see as the simple concept of aerodynamic stability. 

Those early aircraft were outrageously difficult to fly. How so? Think of flying a modern plane loaded far beyond the aft CG with the wings loosely bolted on and at 5% power. Then remember that the structures of those fledgling craft posed more hazard to the pilot in a crash than they did protection. One model of an early Wright Flyer barely did what its name promised. The Wrights built eight Model C aircraft for the military, six of which crashed with fatal results. It would take about two decades for aircraft designers even to begin to build aircraft that were flyable by a less than highly skilled pilot with a bit of luck that day. It would take even longer to where flyable aircraft could be made sufficiently durable, reliable and affordable that they would resemble products an average person might buy and operate. 

So the sense that we have, that the creation of a personal flying segment was a given, ignores the fact that creating aircraft good enough to support such a structure was a staggeringly difficult endeavor, one whose outcome was, for decades, in doubt. 

The Hero Pilot

The notion that you have to be a special kind of human being to be a pilot, which persists to this day with some folks, was a huge obstacle in the way of the creation of a sensible, accessible aviation segment. How it happened is clear: For 20 or 30 years, the world of aviation was one that was inextricably connected to two things, insanely high levels of risk and war. After Kitty Hawk, it took the brothers Wright no time at all to realize that the biggest and most readily fulfillable pathway for the practical use of aircraft, and therefore a profitable commercial application. was for military uses. 

By the early-to-mid 1910s, European powers were sending aircraft to war against each other, and in the United States, American flyers were doing battle in Mexico. In none of these cases were the aircraft anything close to practical weapons of war. Nor were they reliable. The stories of U.S. pilots operating Curtiss JN-3s in Mexico are filled with tales of crashes in every phase of flight, forced landings behind enemy lines due to mechanical failure, with the desperate pilots resorting to trucks and mules for transport back to American lines and some semblance of safety. 

But the real genesis of the hero pilot myth was in World War I, especially when America entered the war in the spring of 1917. Those hero pilots’ names are still familiar to us, even those of us who aren’t pilots. U.S. ace Eddie Rickenbacker, Canadian pilot Billy Bishop and famed German flyer Manfred Von Richthofen (aka the Red Baron) all enjoyed movie star-level fame here and abroad. 

The question, which was seldom asked aloud, was, if you had to be a hero to be a pilot, if you had to risk life and limb to take to the air, if only a very few had what would come to be known as “the right stuff” to be a pilot, what was the difference between what these daredevils did and the acts that high-wire artists and human cannonballs performed? They were for grand causes or great spectacle, not for sport. 

One Non-Delusion: A Glimmer Of Hope Amid Economic Calamities

It wasn’t until the late 1920s that small and fairly flyable designs by companies like Aeronca, with its C-3 flying bathtub, and Taylor Aircraft, with its Cub, were introduced that made sense for the average person to own and that they could go flying in and reasonably be expected to return, both plane and occupants, in one piece. 

If You Build Them, They Will Come

The post-World War II boom in light aviation was both huge and, as it turned out, unsupportable, at least for a while and at the levels imagined by manufacturers in the days after V-J Day.

The problem was optimism. After the war, America began emerging from the privations made necessary by that conflict and the Depression. So, with a million soldiers, many of them pilots, out of the service and coming back home to a jumpstarted economy, the prospects were worthy of some excitement. Not only that, but in the four-plus years that America had been in the war effort, much had been learned about, one, mass production and, two, how to make better-flying airplanes. 

And it happened. From 1946 to 1950, U.S. aircraft makers turned out more than 30,000 aircraft for the civil market, the vast majority of them light planes. In 1947 alone, they churned out 15,594 of them. Manufacturers Aeronca and Globe/Temco (makers of the Swift) were among the leaders in that production, and, by 1948, both had huge fields filled with ready-to-fly airplanes parked for want of customers. 

By 1950, both companies had gone belly up. It didn’t mean America wasn’t ready to fly; it was. In 1949, there were more than 525,000 certificated pilots. The all-time highest number of pilots in America was in 1980, when there were around 827,000. 

So, while light aircraft manufacturing was up to the task of turning out planes, the marketplace was not ready to handle that level of production. Why not? Some economists have theorized that buying an airplane, even at the affordable prices of the late 1940s, was still a stretch for many families. And besides, the post-war era marked a boom in the manufacturing of another product, houses. And it’s easy to say how, when faced with an either/or call on that question, the purchase of a home would take precedence for most. 

It turned out well, eventually. By the 1950s, new and even better planes designed to be easier to fly and to maintain were hitting the market, and at production rates that were sustainable. 

Safety Doesn‘t Matter, At Least Not Much

It’s an attitude that’s closely connected to the myth of the hero pilot, the notion that no matter what happens in the course of any given flight, a “real” pilot will be able to handle it, summoning up the special something needed to right the wrong and save the day. With that thought came a couple of companion concepts—that safety didn’t matter all that much, in large part because it was a preoccupation on something that heroes didn’t need to worry about. After all, they were pretty special. Just ask them. 

The Best Days Of Aviation Are Behind Us

Today, one of the biggest risks we face is our shared sense that we have achieved some kind of pinnacle in light plane aviation or, worse yet, we’re well along the way on a downward slide. There is, unfortunately, plenty of data to support these notions. Prices of all things aviation, from planes to insurance premiums for them, are higher than ever. Most of the planes we fly today are on their way to 50 years of age, if they aren’t there already or well beyond that. 

All of those things are true, but there are things everywhere you look. The technology that we possess in the form of high-powered, low-cost computerized devices, sensors and displays is the stuff of our previous wildest dreams. With full glass cockpits, sophisticated digital autopilots, computerized angle-of-attack displays and solid-state attitude and heading reference sensors all available at prices that make it hard to say “no,” it’s impossible not to be excited about what technology has done to make our flying safer and, in many ways, more enjoyable, too. 

The risk, however, is the idea that our planes are all that they’re going to ever be. It’s simply not so, and even a cursory look at the arc of aviation will show that. Aircraft will continue to change—the Cirrus SR22 has transformed light general aviation in a number of ways. Think glass panels. Think whole-airplane parachutes. Think carbon-fiber construction. 

And more and potentially bigger changes are likely to come. It’s likely that we’ll see the most profound one, the wide availability of electric or hybrid propulsion, perhaps in the form of multi-propeller or even tiltrotor aircraft, within the next decade. 

The post Five Things That Pilots Got Totally Wrong About Aviation Over The Years appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

With all that in mind, here are the stories, well, at least summaries of the stories, of some of the most epic aircraft development programs in history. To top it off, each of these programs faced very different hurdles to success.

AW609 Civil Tiltrotor: New Type, New Rules, New Missions

One of the most intriguing development programs ever is that of the AgustaWestland AW609 civil tiltrotor, in part because its development is so weird and because it’s so typical. To get an idea of what the AW609 is, just think of a three-quarter-scale V-22 Osprey. The concept took its first breath of life in 1996 as a joint development project of Bell Helicopters and Boeing Aircraft. Today, 26 years later, the new owners, Leonardo Aircraft (formerly Agusta/Westland), are hoping to push it past the finish line somewhere around 2025 or 2026, 30 years down the road. That mid-2020s goal might be ambitious. Leonardo had planned on 2021 for full assembly of its conforming prototype, but that target has been tossed into the big sack of missed targets and faulty projections. 

And there are bigger issues. It still needs to get the aircraft type and production certified, and it needs to establish a strong buying case for potential customers, of which Leonardo only names one, Bristow, which will someday take the first two production 609s as part of a sweetheart deal to put the new craft through its paces in several mission profiles. 

But is there really a need for, or a market for, a civil tiltrotor? Some believe it’s a great idea; others think it a terrible one. Or it might be both. On the one hand, at better than 250 knots cruise in airplane mode at 25,000 feet, the 11-passenger, pressurized 609 is as fast as a good twin turboprop, but it can also land and take off vertically. The appeal of this is immense. By being deposited right on their destination’s doorstep, instead of a half-hour’s drive away, travelers can get work done and get back to the home office in many fewer hours for some missions.

On the other hand, will the kinds of high-income folks who can afford such an aircraft be willing to embrace the risks of a new mode of transportation? It’s true that tiltrotor technology is less a mystery today than it was 25 years ago, thanks to two-plus decades of V-22 experience, but there still has got to be higher risk than turboprop twins, like the Beechcraft King Air, with its many millions of hours against which the 609 will compete. Will the big-check writers think it’s a safe bet, in more than both meanings of the word “safe?”  

Some argue that the emergence of a new type of aircraft, electric-powered e-VTOLs, might threaten future sales of the AW609, but it’s unlikely. The Leonardo tiltrotor can fly at 250 knots in the flight levels for hundreds of miles in pressurized comfort. Electric-powered VTOLs can only dream of such capabilities.  

The asking price of the 609 has increased substantially since the late ’90s, when Bell and Boeing started talking publicly about such practicalities. Early on, they were talking $10 million, but that was so last century. Today, that price has ballooned into more realistic territory, between $20 million and $30 million. For starters, one could buy a small fleet of brand-new King Air 360s for that price. 

Topping that off, the 609 is not yet type certified, though at least today, there are certification standards for tiltrotor aircraft, which wasn’t true when the project launched during the Clinton years. 

How likely is it we’ll get to see 609s flying around in five years? Or seven or 10? I wouldn’t put my money on it, though Leonardo has surely sunk hundreds of millions of its dough into its acquisition and development, so it is anxious to get its tiltrotor in the hands of customers, and there  are no unachievable development or certification roadblocks that would prevent it from doing just that. 

Eclipse EA500: Smallest Ever Jet

One of the greatest failures and one of the most successful programs in all of aviation history is that of the Eclipse 500 very light jet. At the time of its development, there was widespread interest in what somebody started calling very light jets, often referred to simply as VLJs. The idea is a very old one, to create a personal jet by taking the engineering framework of light jets, like Cessna’s CitationJet, and making it ever smaller. Williams International commissioned Burt Rutan to build just such a jet to show off a new, very small turbofan engine. True to form, Rutan created something wild, a forward-swept wing, V-tailed jet dubbed the Williams V-Jet II. Microsoft veteran Vern Raburn fell in love with the little jet and ran with it, pouring tens of millions into its early development and ultimately coming up with an airplane that had almost nothing in common with Rutan’s design. 

Early on, the new company, Eclipse Aviation, which was (yes, past tense) based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focused not only on the development of the airplane, which faces numerous steep challenges, but also on creating a market for it. Raburn didn’t want to make a couple dozen jets a year. He wanted to build hundreds, but he knew the only way to do that was to achieve economies of scale, which isn’t possible when you’re turning out handfuls of planes. 

It’s critical to understand the enormity of the project Eclipse had entered into. It would create a sub-6,000-pound (a key weight for ease of certification) twin-jet that would be fast—it was aiming for around 370 knots, could fly high (up to the low 40s) and would be less than or slightly more than a million bucks to buy. Critics said it couldn’t be done, that the very concept of the turbofan couldn’t be effectively scaled down, not to mention all the systems, environmental, bleed air, anti-icing and many more, that would go into a high-flying pressurized twinjet, all of which would still have to be on the jet regardless of how small it was. Despite an engine swap (to a Pratt & Whitney PW610F), Eclipse still managed to get the 500 built and hitting most of its performance targets—that subject is a long story for a different time. 

Raburn envisioned a world in which hundreds or thousands of Eclipse jets would be used for short-haul on-demand charter. Customers would show up at the airport, hop in an Eclipse and jet off, let’s say, to travel 500 nm to swap Nashville twang briefly for New Orleans swing. The tickets would be low priced, multiple strangers would share the ride, and operators would still make a buck based on the sheer number of rides and the low cost of operating the EA 500. To be clear, that marketplace didn’t exist until Raburn came up with it, and as hard as he evangelized for its creation, it never happened. 

The jet he envisioned did indeed happen, and it is nothing short of a marvel, with a ceiling of 41,000 feet, a fuel flow of around 60 gph (total), easy flying manners and an exterior noise level that kept neighbors happy. Eclipse was awarded a controversial provisional type certificate by the FAA in 2006, and it won the prestigious Collier Trophy for the jet that same year. 

Eclipse produced 260 EA500 jets before shutting down operations in what was a billion-dollar bankruptcy. A follow-on company, Eclipse Aerospace/One Aviation, made a slightly beefed-up version, the Model 550, but only delivered 33 of them before closing its doors. 

Liberty XL-2: A Modern Two-Seat Trainer

The Liberty XL-2 is a great little two-seat trainer or runabout. And it came at a time when everyone thought we needed a new one of those. It made sense. The old faves, the Cessna 150/152, the Beech Skipper and the Piper Tomahawk, to name a few, were all long out of production, and many flight schools had defaulted to using four-seaters to do training flights, the vast majority of which carried two people aloft, the learner and the instructor. Once a new, affordable alternative is available, people will beat a path to your hangar door, right? Not really. 

The Liberty was unusual, though not unprecedented, in being a development of an Experimental category plane, the Europa XS, designed by Ivan Shaw. I flew the Europa with demo pilot Pete Clark in Florida in the early 2000s. It was one of the best-handling airplanes I’ve ever had the chance to fly. It was, indeed, capable of some advanced aerobatics, which Pete, a test pilot with long experience, demonstrated for me. It was fabulous. The Europa featured an all-composite airframe and a Rotax 912 for power. It also had a single landing gear, a center-mounted one with wingtip thingies to keep you from dinging the tips should you go a little off-kilter. The design is common in sailplanes. 

The Liberty took the fuselage of the Europa, made a similar planform wing out of sheet metal, and swapped out the Rotax for a FADEC-controlled Continental IOF-240. The slow speed handling is remarkable, approaches are aided by 30-degree Fowler flaps, and there are control sticks for flight control instead of yokes. A pair of gull-wing doors allowed easy in and out, and the seating area offered spectacular visibility. 

So, if you build it, they will come, at least according to Hollywood, but in this case, not so much. Despite a succession of seemingly smart pivots, including diesel and auto-fuel capable engines, partnerships with investors and licensed manufacturers, the Liberty never got much traction. 

My theory is that the premise was flawed. Those two empty seats in the four-place planes flight schools were buying and operating as basic trainers had some intangible value to students and to operators, value that more than makes up for the difference in purchase price and operating costs. So the world, apparently, didn’t need or want a next-gen two-seat trainer. It’s too bad because the Liberty is a nice airplane. Maybe you’ll run into one sometime. The company built 132 of them before closing up shop for good. 

Do you want more Aviation Breakthrough, Oddities, Milestones articles? Enjoy, “Top 8 Aircraft Electronics innovations Of All Time.” 

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The same cannot be said about large engines. Over the course of their time in development, around 10 or 20 years less than that of small engines, big powerplants have swapped technologies five or six times before settling, for the most part, on a formula that delivers ungodly amounts of power with unbelievable levels of reliability. 

But it wasn’t always that way. 

Pratt & Whitney Wasp Radial Engine

In the beginning of powered flight, designers quickly settled, with a bit of palavering, on gas-reciprocating piston engines (with air cooling for them soon winning favor as well). For more pep, aviation followed a new technology, the rotary engine, which was limited, complicated, hard to operate and unreliable. Other than that! 

So it wasn’t long before a new kid showed up, one that had the ability to grow big and strong, something rotaries would never be able to do. That engine was, of course, the radial engine, and the advances it allowed were revolutionary. 

The cylinders of a radial (always an odd number for the sake of four-stroke firing order) are fixed, and cooling is provided by direct airflow into the engine while the plane is in flight, along with a recirculating oil system. It was so much simpler, more capable and reliable than rotary design that, in retrospect, it is no surprise the rotary didn’t fade into the sunset as much as it just went away. 

Early radial engines included the Anzani three-cylinder model, which powered Louis Blériot’s English Channel-crossing Blériot XI, and the nine-cylinder Salmson radial engine, both of which debuted before WWI. But rotaries seized the day, and it wasn’t until around the end of the conflict that radials’ advantages were fully understood. 

While radial engine developments in Germany and England predated it, the Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine was the most influential early radial engine, first run in 1925. P&W would go on to produce more than 35,000 of these 600-hp, 1,344-cubic-inch, nine-cylinder, single-row engines, which were used in dozens of different aircraft models. 

The power output was orders of magnitude greater than the most powerful rotaries, and these radial engines had far better power-to-weight ratios as well. Operating these engines was easy compared to rotaries—power was infinitely adjustable with a radial—and radials were far more reliable than rotaries, too.  

Unlike rotaries, they were also scalable, to a great degree, anyway. Multi-row radials produced by Pratt & Whitney, including the Double Wasp, which powered the Republic P-47, the Vought F4U Corsair, Grumman Hellcat and many others, were 2,400-hp-class engines. Competitor Wright produced its Cyclone series, which ranged up to the twin-row, 18-cylinder Duplex-Cyclone, which could produce as much as 3,700 hp. 

Radial engines, popular in both military and private transportation aircraft, were the predominant engine type leading up to and during WWII, as well as for a time afterward—the late-war B-29 Superfortress was powered by a quartet of Duplex-Cyclone engines. But the writing was on the wall for radial engines even before the end of the war, as the advantages of inline engines highlighted some of the issues with radials, and turbojets were just over the horizon. 

Rolls-Royce Merlin

With the ever-rising bar of expectations for military aircraft, engines had to get more powerful, more reliable and sleeker, too. A couple of inline and V-configuration engines got some momentum in the 1910s, including the Liberty V-12, which powered some WWI aircraft late in the war, as well as ground vehicles and boats. A powerful engine, the V-12 version could produce 400 hp, far greater output than the rotary engines it supplanted. The downside was that much of that additional power was for naught, lost on the draggy and inefficient aircraft it was fitted into. 

But as aircraft throughout the 1920s and early ’30s got more aerodynamically efficient, V-configuration engines came into their own. By 1933, British firm Rolls-Royce flew the first prototype of what would go on to become the most legendary engine of the coming global conflict, a supercharged (in most applications) V-12 engine that produced a sound that some call the most beautiful engine sound ever produced—I am of that opinion, too. That early prototype was buggy, had serious cooling problems, and didn’t deliver near the hoped-for power output of 1,000 horsepower. But it had promise, and the company continued to develop it, working through the engine’s issues, like cooling, which designers largely overcame with a conventional liquid-cooling system. 

By 1936, the V-12 was producing better than 1,000 hp and began going into the production of military aircraft. The Supermarine Spitfire prototype had used an earlier prototype of the Merlin engine; it would go on to use production versions of the Merlin. The model 45 produced 1,470 hp, more than 10 times the power of the most widely used fighter plane engines of WWI, which had unfolded just 20 years earlier. 

Arguably, the ultimate expression of the Merlin-powered fighter is the North American P-51D Mustang, which was outfitted with a version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin built by Packard in the United States, which could turn out 1,490 horsepower under normal operations and 1,790 in emergency (war emergency power) mode. With the big Merlin, the P-51 helped turn the tide of the war with its great range, which allowed it to accompany B-17 bombers deep into enemy territory, and great speed, making it more than a match for the fighters of the Luftwaffe, with the exception of the Me-262—but more on that plane in a bit. 

General Electric J47 Turbojet Engine

Just as the limitations of the rotary engine opened the door late in World War I to new powerplant technologies, so, too, did the limitations of piston aero engines give way to the development and wide adoption of jet engines, principally the turbojet at first. 

In what ways did piston engines fall short? Let us count the ways! They were heavy, mechanically complex (in multirow radials, incredibly so), relatively unreliable and, lastly and most importantly, they needed a propeller. What is wrong with propellers? One big thing is they can only spin so fast, and the bigger you make them, the faster their tips spin, and once the tips go supersonic, the aerodynamic penalties are staggering. By the end of the 1930s, big-engine piston fighters were knocking on the speed of sound, and it became clear that the biggest thing holding them back was the propeller—well, along with the limited amount of horsepower you could get out of a piston engine without making it prohibitively heavy and complex. None of it would work, and in an age when speed meant power and survival, there had to be a better way. 

That way was the turbojet engine, first developed independently by British engineer Frank Whittle and German designer Hans von Ohain. Compared to even a low-powered piston engine, a jet engine is mechanically simple, and the concept—that the propulsion would be provided by direct thrust and not the use of a secondary device, the propeller—freed aircraft designs of the need for a propeller. It was clear that the speed of sound would fall before long. 

Even by the end of the war, the end was nigh for piston-engine-powered fighter aircraft. The Luftwaffe even fielded a remarkably effective jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me-262, a twin-jet fighter that was produced at the end of the war in limited numbers, which was in part because Allied bombers went to great lengths to target the plants where the jet was being produced. 

It’s hard to pin the mantle on any one turbojet engine as the one, but the General Electric J47 is a good place to start. Developed from previous-generation GE engines, the J47 made its mark, powering some of the most iconic early jet fighters, including the North American F-86, as well as groundbreaking post-war bombers such as the Boeing B-47 Stratojet and the Convair B-36 Peacemaker. General Electric churned out more than 36,000 J47s in just over eight years. Developing about 6,000 pounds of thrust, the J47 was able to power sufficiently sleek jets to low supersonic speeds. Before long, turbojet engines were increasingly powerful. A decade after the J47 made its first flight, GE’s YJ93 turbojet was capable of producing up to 30,000 pounds of thrust with afterburner, powering the North American XB-70 to up to Mach 3.1. 

Turbojet engines would revolutionize commercial air travel as well, helping manufacturers create airliners, like the groundbreaking Boeing 707, that could hurdle continents by flying at high subsonic speeds while carrying previously unimaginably large payloads. 

Pratt & Whitney JT3D Turbofan Engine

Okay, here’s an engine you might never have heard of, but it was the first popular engine of a type that has arguably had more use/impact than all of the others combined: the turbofan. 

General Electric GE9X

When Boeing came out with its 777, which started flying with the airlines in 1995, its defining feature was its twin-engine design. It was long thought (and regulated as such) that twin-engine aircraft didn’t have enough reserve power to fly long legs were one of its engines to fail on a long overwater segment. But the 777 helped flip such thinking on its head, and today it’s the four-engine airliners, like the 777’s stablemate, the legendary 747, that are endangered species. And the way that the 777 did its magic was by utilizing the largest engines in the world. 

With fuel efficiency being king today, twins have become the de facto long-haul platforms of the majority of major airlines that fly intercontinental routes. 

And the biggest is yet to come. Slated to power the in-development Boeing 777X, the General Electric GE9X is a behemoth of an engine and a miserly one, at that. It is the largest jet engine in the world, and the most powerful. How big? At 134 inches, its fan’s diameter is greater than that of the 737’s fuselage. Generating an eye-popping 134,000 pounds of thrust, it is more powerful than the rockets that brought America’s first astronauts into orbit. And while it produces 6,400 pounds of thrust more than the previously recognized most powerful turbofan engine, the 777’s GE-90-115B, it is 10% more fuel-efficient. 

8 Light Planes Engines That Changed Aviation

The post The Evolution of the World‘s Largest Aircraft Engines appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

While we normally talk about things in very aviation-specific terms, like building better large engines, in this case, the hurdles we’ll discuss are broad barriers to invention, most of which human innovators face every time they invent something and then try to implement the technology into everyday life, as we saw with the invention of everything from electricity to modern agriculture. 

So, here’s a list of those big hurdles aviation had to face and how the genius designers who came before us figured it out.  

Practicality

After something is invented, like electricity (and I’m not going to get into the invented vs. discovered debate), one needs to figure out how to make it useful. The whole alternating current vs. direct current debate was all about just that. How could people best put electricity to use in their everyday lives? In terms of airplanes, the question was, could plane makers build planes that were strong enough, safe enough and fast enough to make sense for regular people to fly? For a couple decades, the answer to that question evolved from “no” to “kind of.” World War I, for instance, saw wide deployment of aircraft to very little practical advantage. By World War II, it’s fair to say that aircraft decided the war in both the European and Pacific theaters. 

Planes by the late ’30s were much more rugged than the feathery designs of the First World War, and the engines that powered them were not only far more powerful but far more reliable, to boot. The enabling technology—sorry, tube-and-rag fans—was the use of metal, most notably aluminum alloys, in the modern designs. This lightweight and super-strong material allowed planes to grow in size and capability, and these wartime gains transferred to peacetime aviation as the global conflict wound down.

Poster Plane For Practicality: Douglas DC-3. 

Everyday Analog: Cellphones.

Reliability

As mentioned above—and please remember that these hurdles aren’t neatly separate from each other—the goal of improving the reliability of airplanes was tied to developments in materials science. In this case, it was all about metallurgy and machine technology. 

In fact, improvements in metallurgy have driven improvements throughout the history of aviation. The biggest bugaboo for airplanes, which will come as no surprise to those of us who are pilots, is the engines that power our planes. Recently, I watched a video of a DC-6 taking off from the fog in Anchorage. What I thought, honestly, was, that sound is amazing! And, what a beautiful plane! But mostly I was thinking, how the heck do they manage to keep all four of those double-row radials running at the same time? The engines, as you might know, are marvels at squeezing the very last ounce of practicality out of a technology, in this case, the radial engine, or, if you will, the internal combustion reciprocating engine. The only way those marvels happened and could have happened is that by the 1930s, metallurgy had improved to the point that such engines could work because the metals were stronger and more heat tolerant, and the tolerances of their manufacture were so much finer than even a decade before. 

These improvements in materials and manufacturing led to turbine engines becoming reliable and practical options, and turbine engines changed everything. 

Market Appeal

Building airplanes fast enough and with enough range to make them practical long-distance transportation options wasn’t as tough a barrier as some of the others but only because the modes of transportation planes competed against set the bar so low. By the time large passenger jets came along, one could go coast to coast in the United States, a journey that would take several days in a train or an automobile, in mere hours. You better believe that the world beat a path to that mousetrap. 

In terms of market appeal, small planes have been a much tougher sell. There are so many things that we pilots literally don’t care about (or at least are willing to put up with), like not being able to stand up and walk around or visit the facilities, not to mention the din of most of the planes we fly that is just about impossible to design out of them. I should say, at least until now, those things have been impossible to overcome. In time, perhaps, inventors will tame them all. Well, maybe not all of them.

User-Friendliness

This is a major factor in the success of any technology that aims for mainstream market acceptance. Examples? Electrical outlets that won’t occasionally send you flying back across the room, automobiles you don’t have to hand crank, and computers you can use without knowing how to code. With airplanes, there are so many hurdles to user-friendliness, it’s hard to know where to start. Those of us who learned to fly in Pipers and Cessnas and Diamonds have no idea how squirrelly antique airplanes are. I’ve flown a few that tested the limits of my piloting ability to keep straight and level. Would I get used to flying such planes? I have faith that I would. 

But that begs the question, why would any airplane maker build a plane that you had to fight to maintain control? The only answer I can come up with is, they didn’t know any better. Once technologies came about that effectively eliminated what we today think about as poor flying qualities, but which were once regarded simply as flying qualities, every respectable plane maker put them into their designs. I grew up driving stick shifts, but it’s no surprise that they are about as rare as hand cranks on the front of the hood. 

I’m proud that I know how to drive a stick, though, honestly, it’s so second nature that it doesn’t feel any more difficult than driving a car with an automatic stick shift. But many folks believe that the craft of flying, the stick and rudder stuff, the taildragger skills, are a central part of the experience. But the immediate and long-lasting success of models that eliminated all of those things, like the Cessna 172 and Piper PA-28, shows that user-friendliness sells. 

Breaking The Believability Barrier

There are certain technologies so revolutionary they boggle the contemporary imagination. Recordings of the human voice, movies, television, nuclear bombs and the internet are all perfect examples. 

One might argue that the Wright brothers broke this barrier with their first flight in 1903, but I’d disagree. People saw birds fly and planes and motorcycles go fast—not that the Wright Flyer was at all fast—but what people never saw was a rocket ship going to the moon or planes so fast they broke the speed of sound like the cracking of a bullwhip. We still have some believability barriers to breach. Quiet engines. Super-fast small planes. Supersonic bizjets. Self-flying planes. Will we get there? My money’s on “yes.”

Do you want more Aviation Breakthroughs, Oddities, Milestones? Enjoy “Five Weird Airplanes That Were Surprisingly Popular.”

The post 5 Barriers Aviation Innovators Busted appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Truth is, there have been many thousands of great pilots. But famous pilots? That’s a whole different conversation. As I pondered the subject of just how a pilot translates greatness into fame, the answer came to me. The process is different for each one, and that process reveals important details about that pilot’s character! and about ours, too. 

Here are the stories of five important aviators and how those stories became known. 

Bessie Coleman

There’s something deeply inspirational about people who don’t step into success from the top rung of the ladder but who start from a position that everyone, or just about everyone, tells them is hopeless. For Coleman, the odds were beyond stacked. Born in Texas in 1892, Coleman grew up in a family of sharecroppers. Her family—her father was Black and Native American (Cherokee), and her mother was Black—was desperately poor, and life was hard for Coleman and her 12 siblings, four of whom died in childhood. She worked picking cotton as a youth and went to a small rural school when she could and showed great promise, earning entry into a small college. Despite desperate circumstances, Coleman’s dreams were lofty, literally so. But as fate would have it, it was hard to become a pilot if you were a woman and darn near impossible if you were a Black woman. So, Coleman, with financial assistance from a successful African American Chicago-based publisher, went to France to learn to fly, and did she ever learn. 

When Coleman earned her International pilot’s certificate in June of 1921, she became the first Black woman in the world to get her license, as well as the first Native American, man or woman, to do so. 

Upon returning to the States, Coleman became a celebrity and soon began flying airshows. Her career was short but brilliant; after performing for many years without incident, she perished in an accident in April of 1926, falling to her death from an estimated 2,000 feet after the plane she was a passenger in went out of control. There was no seatbelt, and Coleman was not wearing a parachute. 

Coleman’s life arc was meteoric, and her death was tragic. But her fame spread far beyond aviation, and in the 95-plus years since her loss, her memory and example have served as inspiration to countless people—especially those who are discriminated against and who face huge obstacles. The lesson of her life is to fight and never give up hope. 

Bessie Coleman’s death wasn’t widely reported on in mainstream American media. It was the Black-owned and Black-run media that reported on it and often kept her legacy alive until recent years, when the importance of her work became widely understood. She was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2006, 80 years after her tragic passing.

Bessie Coleman, America’s First Black Female Pilot

Charles Lindbergh

The first person to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic was many things—a pilot first and foremost, I’d argue, but running a close second was his skill as a promoter. Charles Lindbergh became famous as an aviator because he wanted fame, and he took the big risk. It paid off. It’s seldom in history that a planned achievement, in this case, the crossing by plane of the Atlantic Ocean, hits the perfect note at just the right moment. But like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell before him, both of whom captured the popular imagination with the promise of world-changing technology, Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic was likewise magical. A decade after the War to End All Wars, and a decade before the world war that came next, Lindbergh’s message was one of hope and progress. The world, Lindy seemed to prove, could be made so much smaller. 

Aviation could be an enabling technology toward a closer, more interdependent and progressive planet. Of course, the opposite wound up happening. Before long, aviation became the centerpiece of bigger, faster and crueler wars, as the Luftwaffe rained hellfire over Europe and beyond. But for a glorious and too-short period of time, Lindbergh’s trans-navigation of a vast ocean resonated and turned people’s eyes skyward. And, no, it didn’t hurt that there were magazine articles by the hundreds, feature films and books about Lucky Lindy and his death-defying air voyage. But in the end, it was the event that drove the fame and not the other way around. 

Ultimately, the aviator’s legacy was complex, with dubious associations politically and revelations after his death of bigamy—he fathered at least seven children with women in Germany outside of his marriage to Anne Morrow Lindbergh. But the fact remains: Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing inspired a generation of aviators and aviators to come so powerfully that we are still seeing the positive ripples of that flight today, 95 years later. 

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart is arguably the most compelling figure in the history of aviation, and only a part of that is because she died young or, rather, she disappeared. James Dean and Sam Cooke left us too soon, but Amelia vanished, leaving us with great sadness and, in some cases, the faint hope that she might still be out there somewhere. 

Earhart famously went missing after failing to find her next fuel stop, tiny Howland Island, in the remote and vast Pacific while on an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The most likely theory—and the only one with credible proof—is that she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed in the Pacific after running out of fuel, dying in or shortly after the crash. The most extensive search in American history failed to turn up a single clue, and some searchers continue today to look for the wreckage of her plane. 

Earhart’s aviation career was a string of brilliant successes until her demise. She held dozens of aviation records, including some of the most remarkable in flying history. She was the first woman (and the second person) to fly solo across the Atlantic; she was the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California, and she established many other point-to-point firsts. Apart from that, she was an author, a lecturer, a magazine editor, a clothing designer and a leader in the women’s movement of the day, while working diligently to establish an identity in the media that underscored the capability of women to succeed in fields previously closed to them. 

Even before her tragic disappearance, Earhart had achieved great fame, partly through her ability to use media to promote her brand but even more so because of her remarkable abilities and achievements, and her name and story continue to inspire aviators around the world. 

Did We Discover The Fate Of Amelia Earhart?

Chuck Yeager

When people learn about Chuck Yeager, many folks assume that when he became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound, in October of 1947 in the high desert of southern California, the presses worldwide must have been stopped. Ticker-tape parades and speaking tours surely followed. But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, he continued in relative anonymity at Muroc Dry Lake among the Joshua trees and X-planes. Fame would come a bit later, when the next year, he was feted and awarded the prestigious Collier Trophy. 

But in aviation circles, Yeager was a big deal even before busting the sound barrier. Despite possessing only a high school diploma, he was able to trade in his Air Corps wrenches for a leather jacket and went to fly in battle in Europe. He became an ace while piloting a P-51 Mustang, Glamorous Glen, named after his wife, recording 11.5 kills, including a rare shootdown of a jet, the Messerschmitt Me 262. 

After the war, Yeager’s skills as a pilot and leader were well known, so his choice to fly the Bell XS-1 in the trials was not a big surprise. But because of the secrecy surrounding the program, it was around eight months before the news of the first Mach 1 flight came to light. Yeager, ever the fierce competitor, continued to fly faster, to command squadrons and fly in combat up through Vietnam. The fame wasn’t what he wanted. It was what he got for his achievements, especially that one, and it was pushing himself and proving himself that mattered to him more than anything. A big part of Yeager’s fame was that very quality, an intensity of purpose and self-belief that predated that first supersonic flight by many years and stayed with him for the rest of his years until he died in 2020. 

Who Was the First Supersonic Pilot?

Going Direct: Two Degrees Of Separation From Chuck Yeager

Bob Hoover

If there was a single, seismic event that propelled Chuck Yeager to fame, for Robert A. Hoover, universally known as “Bob,” there were a thousand small tremors. As Yeager’s backup and the number two option to go supersonic, Hoover was on the doorstep to Yeager-like fame, but that’s not the way it went down. 

As was made famous in the book and film “The Right Stuff,” Yeager gutted it out, compensating for injuries sustained in a horseback riding accident shortly before his famous flight, and so fame was a given. Hoover, who died in 2016, almost certainly would have made a better spokesperson for all things supersonic—he was one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met—but instead, his path to fame, if you can call it that, followed very different terrain. And while Hoover is a near-deity to pilots, he’s not well known outside of aviation. Which apparently was just fine with Bob. 

As a young man, Hoover went to war, like Yeager did, flying fighters against the Luftwaffe. Unlike Yeager, whom fate would yoke to Hoover for the rest of his life, the young Hoover got shot down while flying a Spitfire over Sicily. He was captured and held by the Germans as a POW for 16 months. When a riot broke out, Hoover climbed a fence, along with two other American soldiers, and took off, eventually finding an airport and an unattended German fighter, a Focke- Wulf Fw 190 with enough fuel to make it to Holland, where he landed after seeing tulips and windmills. After a few tense hours facing off with Dutch farmers, who assumed he was a downed German pilot, he was rescued by British troops. 

After the war, he was sent to Muroc, California, where he met Yeager and became his crew chief and backup. Hoover flew chase on the October day in 1947 that Yeager moved the Mach meter for the first time into supersonic territory. 

Whereas Yeager became a career military man, Hoover left the service in 1948 and worked in what we now refer to as the defense industry. He test-flew aircraft and mentored fighter pilots in Korea, where, despite his civilian status, he flew numerous bombing missions. 

But what pushed him to fame was his airshow flying career. From the early 1960s into the 1990s, Hoover flew at many hundreds of airshow events in one of two planes, his bright yellow P-51 dubbed “Ole Yeller” or his Shrike Commander, a twin-engine civilian plane that he for many years demonstrated for the manufacturer, North American Rockwell. 

His airshow routine was world famous—again, among aviation types. In the Shrike, Hoover would shut down one of the engines and fly much of the series single engine, a challenging and risky configuration, though apparently not for Bob. When he was tired of flying advanced aerobatic maneuvers on one engine, Hoover would shut down the one working engine and proceed to fly a series of maneuvers using only the energy the impromptu glider already had, culminating in a silky-smooth landing with both engines shut down. 

In his later years, Hoover became a folk hero in aviation after the FAA revoked his medical certificate over the agency’s concern for Hoover’s competence to fly. It was a move the FAA miscalculated, as the aviation world rallied behind Bob. Before long, it was his revocation that got revoked, and Hoover flew airshows for many years afterward, delighting hundreds of thousands of airshow goers with performances that never dulled with time. Hoover, who died in 2016, remains an inspirational figure in the aviation world, not for any singular achievement but, rather, for a life’s work in the air conducted with grace, humor and humility, always underscored by his great skill as a pilot. 

Going Direct: Why Bob Hoover Touched Us All

The post Five Pilots That Reached Aviation Immortality appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

With that, let’s take a look at how a great company redefined the world of personal air transportation.

Airmaster

Sometimes the original ancestor airplane gives few clues that it could someday inspire the kind of state-of-the-art product we know that it ultimately will. And so it is with the Cessna Airmaster, a mid-’30s advancement that, as the company surely knew, wasn’t advanced enough. It was and remains a beautiful aircraft, and it was competitive with a couple of other cabin monoplanes of the day from Stinson and others, though it had little to distinguish it from them. Perhaps its most noteworthy design feature is its cantilever wing. But in terms of materials, the Airmaster, with its fabric-covered, welded steel fuselage, wood wings and radial engine/taildragger design, was decidedly old school. But you probably know just where this is going. First flight: Aug. 19, 1934. Number built: 183. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 140

A year after the 195 made its first flight, Cessna introduced the most revolutionary small plane in its history, at least in terms of design influence—the Cessna 140. A two-seat side-by-side trainer/runabout, it would become not only a popular model in its own right but also the jumping-off point for two decades of new models. What was revolutionary about it? How was it different from the 195? The answers are, in scale. The 140 series had a five-year production run, with nearly 8,000 produced. By the end of its production, the 140A had metal wings, rear windows and updated wing struts. It’s counterintuitive, but the wing struts were an advancement over the cantilever (no-strut) wing of the 195. The 140’s was lighter, very strong and much easier to produce. There was very little downside and lots of upside. The other advancement was the diminutive scale of it. It was easy to fly, used very little fuel, and managed decent speed for not much in the way of horsepower. First flight: June 28, 1945. Number built: 7,644. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 195 Businessliner

After the war, Cessna designers correctly believed that a new, more modern consumer would demand new, more modern aircraft, and they did. To fulfill this need, Cessna created a new breed of airplane that still had one gear leg firmly stuck in the pre-war era. The 195 was a departure from the Airmaster in many ways. It featured all-metal design and a more powerful engine and kept the already-modern cantilever wing design. But the designers held on to as many features as they let go of. The 195 retained two main features from the Airmaster, those being the taildragger gear configuration and the radial engine. In essence, the designers at Cessna failed to be modern enough. Contrast the 195 with another light single produced across town in Wichita, the Beechcraft Bonanza, which was the first truly modern light plane. Unlike the 195, it featured a lower-horsepower opposed engine, sleek aerodynamics, a low wing and the same all-metal construction as the 195. Not that the 195 isn’t a great airplane. It is. But it was an evolutionary death in many ways, and to its credit, Cessna knew that. First flight: 1945. Number built: 1,180. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 180

If the 172 (wait for it) was the epitome of modernizing a good product to make it a blockbuster, the upgrade of the 170 into the 180 is the ruggedizing of an existing product for a segment of the market that flies harder and hauls more. The 180 first flew in 1952 and was produced from 1953 all the way up until 1980, this despite the fact that its higher-powered stablemate, the 185, was all that and a lot more. In a way, the success of the 180 was one of two taildraggers that Cessna continued to produce in parallel with their tricycle-gear counterparts, the 182 and the 206, respectively, though the 206 was an outgrowth of the 205. The 180 and the 185 continue to be highly valued and heavily utilized aircraft in the bush. First flight: May 26, 1952. Number built: 6,193. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 170

Today, the 170 is almost a niche plane, but this 140 for four was perfectly sized for the mass market Cessna was looking to command. A little more powerful, faster and by definition roomier, the all-metal opposed engine-powered 170 was a quiet revolution, one that would take Piper more than a decade to counter, when it finally ditched the Tri-Pacer approach to small plane design and came out with the Cherokee. It would take Beech even longer to come out with its competitor, the Musketeer, and by then Cessna has already come out with the next big thing. First flight: June 1, 1948. Number built: 5,174. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 185 Skywagon

As far as the 185 is concerned, all that’s true for the 180 is true and then some for the light and rugged 185, which was one of Cessna’s longest-produced aircraft, getting its start in 1961 and continuing to be built until 1985. The 185 is powered by Continental six-cylinder engines, the 470 early on and, later, 520-series engines of up to 300-hp, giving it a payload of around 1,400 pounds. Because of their capacity and power, 185s are popular floatplanes. First flight: July 1960. Number built: More than 4,400. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 172 Skyhawk

That next big thing was the 172, which Cessna brought to market in 1956. The 172 wasn’t as big a deal as the 170 in terms of concept—it really was a 170 with a nose gear, at least at first—but the impact of that nose gear, which made landing a plane not only easier but also a lot more reliable, changed the market. And the 172 took over the market, becoming in essence the four-door sedan of the air. Over time, the plane evolved a great deal, even if it looks largely the same from 1961 on, and Cessna over the years continued to sell a lot of them, around 50,000 overall. It is, as you surely know, the most-produced aircraft in history. Today, new Skyhawks are sold almost exclusively as trainers, and they fetch a breathtaking price, too, though older ones are still changing hands for a lot less and are still being flown for all the great reasons they originally were. First flight: June 12, 1955. Number built: More than 44,000. Status: In production.

Cessna 150/152

It’s hard to believe that the nosewheel version of the Cessna 140 could become anything other than a forgettable staple of aviation’s past, but despite its small size and cozy seating, the 150 is not only one of the most-produced planes in history, it’s also one of the most important. While today the 172 is the most widely used trainer in the world, for decades that distinction went to the 150 and its successor, the 152, which were economical to buy, fly and fix. This magic formula, which has been nearly impossible to replicate in recent decades, allowed many tens of thousands of people to learn to fly, many of whom would be hard pressed to make it happen today. Cessna declined to reintroduce the 152 when it began building piston singles again in the early ’90s, though after the Skycatcher debacle, it probably wished that it had. First flight: 1977. Number built: 7,584. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 182 Skylane

The 182 is a beefier version of the 172, true, but by adding power and strength, Cessna took a product pretty good at most everything and created a step-up plane that was remarkably satisfying in just about every way. It is fast enough, it hauls a good load, it’s roomy, and it’s rugged enough for dirt and gravel. For many pilots, the 182 is an arrival, and its charms were no secret. Cessna has built more than 23,237 Skylanes. It is, indeed, one of the three models Cessna reintroduced when it restarted piston production in the mid-’90s. Cessna also used the 182 as the jumping-off point for the development, through a short intermediate step or two, into the 206 and the 210. First flight: 1956. Number built: More than 23,237. Status: In production.

Cessna 210 Centurion

During the late ’50s and early ’60s, Cessna was dominant in the market for light and medium performance singles with its 172, 182 and 150 models, but it was also dipping its toe in the high-performance market, which it had previously straddled with its fixed-gear big-engine taildragger, the 195, which it called the Businessliner. Its initial foray into the market was underwhelming. The first iteration of the 210 was little more than a 182 with retractable gear and a bigger engine, a 260-hp six-cylinder Continental. It was certainly no match for the Beech Bonanza nor the Piper Comanche, two high-performance retractable-gear models. But Cessna kept on tinkering with the formula. By 1967, the 210 was the way we think of it today, with a good-sized cabin, slicker aerodynamics, retractable gear, a big motor and, of course, that beautiful cantilever wing. By this point, the Centurion was a unicorn, the only high-wing, high-performance six-seater on the market, and it attracted a huge following, eventually even getting a pressurized version, the P-210, of which Cessna built 874 of them, almost one-tenth of the nearly 10,000 Centurions that Cessna churned out. The 210 was another casualty of the downturn of the early ’80s, and, like the 150, it would not live to see another day even after Cessna resumed production on other models 10 years after. First flight: January 1957. Number built: 9,304. Status: Out of production.

Cessna 206 Stationair

One of at least four planes that evolved from the 182, the 206 has, like the 185, become a stalwart of backcountry flying. With its big rear-loading doors, large useful load and respectable cross-country performance, the 206 can serve as a capacious personal transportation airplane with a backcountry attitude or backcountry air taxi with an attitude. Along with the 172 and 182, the 206 was one of three planes that were reintroduced when Cessna restarted piston production after its 10-year-long hiatus. First flight: 1962. Number built: More than 8,506. Status: In production.

Cessna 177 Cardinal

If the Centurion represented the pinnacle of single-engine achievement for Cessna, the Cardinal represents the company coming up against the future and a marketplace of customers that was changing slower than its designs were. As you might know, Cessna envisioned the Cardinal, a four-seat, high-cantilever-winged, stabilator-equipped, fixed-gear (the retractable version came later) personal airplane, as a replacement for the 172 Skyhawk. In contrast to the launch of the 172, the coming-out party for the Cardinal was a disaster. It was close to a dealer revolt. The Cardinal had teething problems, true, but the biggest one, which necessitated the redesign of the horizontal tail, was quickly accomplished. The plane itself was a delight. Fun to fly, easy to get into and back out of, and it is one of the prettiest airplanes that Cessna or anyone else, for that matter, has ever made. But for all the Skyhawk lacked in sex appeal, it somehow more than made up for it in its homey and wildly utilitarian way. The Cardinal did all right, with Cessna building more than 4,000 of them over a 10-year span ending in 1977, but the Skyhawk never skipped a beat, maintaining its popularity through the introduction of the Cardinal and beyond, to the present day, in fact. First flight: July 15, 1966. Number built: 4,295. Status: Out of production.

This Incredible Plane: Cessna 140

This Incredible Plane: Cessna 152 Aerobat

The post Cessna Single-Engine Evolution: 30 Years Of Magic appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.