Aviation: Cessna’s Skymaster

On its maiden flight over Wichita last week, the new plane made a striking silhouette against the prairie skies. It was like no other private plane in the world.

Twin tail cones swept back from the wings to form a goal-post-shaped rudder assembly. Even more unusual were its twin engines, hung fore and aft on its gracefully streamlined cabin pod. one pulling, one pushing. The plane was the Skymaster, Cessna Aircraft Co.’s newest entry in the race for the flying businessman’s dollar. For Cessna, world’s biggest private-planemaker, the Skymaster is a bold new venture aimed at procuring an even bigger slice than the 47% of the private-plane market the company now has.

Specifically, the Skymaster is aimed at the $40,000-class twin-engine plane market now dominated by Piper’s Apache. The Skymaster, to go into production next year, will be powered by two new Continental 180-h.p. engines, carry four passengers at a cruising speed of about 180 m.p.h., take off and land in less than 800 ft. of runway, fly as high as 22,000 ft. and climb 1,550 ft. per minute. Moreover, the unusual tandem engine mounting virtually eliminates the problem of torque and unbalance that usually occurs when a conventional twin-engine plane loses power in one engine, making it so difficult to fly that comparatively few weekend flyers hold twin-engine ratings. The result is a two-engine plane that Cessna believes pilots with a single-engine rating (the bulk of the businessman flyers) can safely fly. If FAA provides a new rating for the Skymaster, Cessna thinks that many a smaller plane owner will trade up to the two-engine class.

The man behind the Skymaster is Cessna President Dwane L. Wallace, 49, a lean, rawboned management pilot who drove Cessna ahead of Beech Aircraft Corp. as the No. 1 maker of private planes for the first time in 1959 (TIME, April 27, 1959)— Though Cessna’s total sales of $103 million were down 2% for fiscal 1960 (year ending Sept. 30), owing to a drop in military orders for Cessna’s air force training jets, there was no slackening of demand for private planes or in the pace of the company’s diversification.

Cessna, which has long made hydraulic equipment for farm machinery, this month will start up a new hydraulics plant in Glenrothes, Scotland. It is expanding the product line of Aircraft Radio Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary in Boonton, N.J., to include radios for all size airplanes. Last year the company bought out a propeller maker, Dayton’s McCauley Industrial Corp. Foreign sales accounted for 19% of Cessna’s private-plane airplane sales in 1960, and it expects even bigger foreign sales in the years ahead. To cash in on this market, Cessna last year bought a 49% interest in France’s Avion Max Holste, which makes utility planes. Currently, it is negotiating with Argentina to set up a Cessna assembly plant there to help supply the South American market.