AVIATION: Everyman’s Jet?

Cessna Aircraft Co., fast overhauling Beech as the biggest U.S. producer of private planes, last week went into jets. The Air Force announced that it would buy more than 140 of Cessna’s trim, twin-jet basic flight trainer, the T-37. Cost: $26 million.

By investing in its first jet-powered basic trainer, the Air Force hopes to save money by sharply reducing the flight hours necessary to qualify a cadet for supersonic fighters and bombers. Flight cadets will drop 90 hours of prop training in North American’s T-28 trainer, take the stick of the Cessna jet after only 40 hours of basic piston-engine flight in Beech’s Mentor (T-34. In the T-37, instructor and student sit side by side instead of tandem. With 150 hours in the T-37, the student can step up to Lockheed’s T-33, quickly graduate to supersonic F-100s. By 1960 the Air Force expects to have about 500 T-37s in the air.

Though it created the T-37 as a purely military jet, Cessna is well aware that it may also have the prototype of the first U.S. private jet plane. By removing the present gas tank from the fuselage and carrying gas in wing tanks, the T-37 can be easily converted into a four-passenger plane. The plane can take off from a 2,500-ft. runway, fly at a top speed of 400 m.p.h., yet land at the comparatively low speed of 80 m.p.h. When Cessna gets into peak production of the plane, it expects to be turning them out for the Air Force at $100,000 or less, a price not out of line with present de luxe small private planes.