The car dealer who copied Blériot

In 1910 a successful car dealer from Enid, Oklahoma, watched an air show and decided he had to fly. Clyde Cessna had grown up on a farm at Rago, Kansas, improving the machinery as a boy. Now he built a monoplane modelled on Louis Blériot’s cross-Channel aircraft and fitted it with a modified motorboat engine of 40 horsepower. He crashed it, repeatedly. Then, in June 1911, the Silverwing flew — making Cessna, by his biographers’ reckoning, the first person to build and fly an aeroplane in the American heartland. In 1925 he joined Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman to found Travel Air, and on 7 September 1927 he started a company of his own in Wichita.

The nephews take over

It began as Cessna-Roos, but partner Victor Roos lasted barely a month and his name was dropped. Then the Depression flattened the market and the plant closed. The rescue came from inside the family. In January 1934 Clyde’s nephews, Dwane Wallace, a freshly graduated aeronautical engineer, and his lawyer brother Dwight, won a proxy fight for control, promising stockholders they would work for next to nothing. Dwane designed the C-34 Airmaster and raced it himself, winning the Detroit News Trophy three times in a row and the right to call it the World’s Most Efficient Airplane. By October 1936 Clyde had gone back to farming, and Dwane, not yet 25, was in charge.

Bamboo bombers and Bird Dogs

War turned the little firm into a factory town. Cessna had about 200 employees in July 1940; by 1944 it had 6,074. Its twin-engine T-50, first flown on 26 March 1939, became the AT-17 and UC-78 — nicknamed the Bamboo Bomber — and 5,422 were built. In peacetime Cessna turned to the Army again: the O-1 Bird Dog, 3,431 built, became a fixture of the Vietnam War. On 29 April 1975 a South Vietnamese major crammed his wife and five children into a two-seat Bird Dog and found USS Midway with an hour’s fuel left. The crew pushed Bell Hueys over the side to clear the deck so the little Cessna could land.

The most-built aeroplane ever

The aeroplane that defines the name arrived in 1955. The Cessna 172 was a high-wing, four-seat tourer with a tricycle undercarriage, and it did nothing dramatic except work. More than 44,000 had been built by 2015, more than any other aircraft in history. Its siblings sold in the tens of thousands too: 23,839 Cessna 150s and more than 23,237 182 Skylanes. In 1963 a 172 became the company’s 50,000th aircraft. The marque also proved absurdly durable: from 4 December 1958 Robert Timm and John Cook kept a 172 aloft over Las Vegas for 64 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes and 5 seconds — about 150,000 miles without landing.

A Cessna in Red Square

Cessna’s most notorious flight was made in a Skyhawk built under licence in France. On 28 May 1987 Mathias Rust, a German teenager, flew a rented Reims F172P through Soviet airspace and landed near Red Square without ever being intercepted. It was a deep humiliation for the Soviet air defence system. Cessna’s military record was rather more deliberate. Its T-37 Tweet, first flown in 1954, trained US Air Force pilots for more than half a century until 31 July 2009, and its armed offspring, the A-37 Dragonfly, still flies with Latin American air forces. Over Vietnam, 532 O-2 Skymasters directed air strikes.

Citation

In 1969 Cessna flew the jet that would redefine its future. The Citation, first delivered in 1972, was a straight-winged, approachable jet aimed at owners stepping up from propeller aircraft, and it found its market. Cessna kept refining the formula — the Citation II, the CitationJet, the Excel — until the family became the largest business-jet fleet in the world, with 8,000 delivered by 2022. Then it went the other way: the Citation X of 1993, cruising at up to Mach 0.935, was among the fastest civil aircraft flying. Its first customer, in July 1996, was the golfer Arnold Palmer.

The lawyers ground the fleet

By the 1980s, though, product-liability lawsuits were costing more than the aeroplanes. In 1986 Cessna, by then owned by General Dynamics, stopped building piston aircraft altogether, keeping only the Caravan in production. US piston shipments collapsed from about 18,000 in 1978 to 928 in 1994. Only after Congress passed the General Aviation Revitalization Act in August 1994 did Cessna, owned by Textron from 1992, reopen its single-engine line at a new plant in Independence, Kansas. Since 2014 Cessna has been a brand of Textron Aviation alongside Beechcraft. Its newest design, the SkyCourier, flew in 2020 for launch customer FedEx — proof the Wichita formula still sells.

Factories

• Wichita works · Wichita, Kansas — Company home since 1927 and Textron Aviation headquarters
• Independence plant · Independence, Kansas — Opened for the 1996 restart of single-engine piston production
• Reims Aviation (licensee) · Reims, France — Built Cessnas under licence, including 1,764 F150s and the F172 flown by Mathias Rust

People

• Clyde Cessna · founder — 1879–1954; flew his first home-built monoplane in 1911; co-founded Travel Air
• Victor Roos · co-founder — Left after about a month in 1927
• Dwane Wallace · president 1935–1964, later chairman — 1911–1989; Clyde’s nephew; led Cessna until 1975
• Dwight Wallace · co-owner — Lawyer brother who helped win the 1934 proxy fight
• Russell W. Meyer Jr. · chairman from 1975 — Halted piston production in 1986 and restarted it after GARA
• Arnold Palmer · golfer, first Citation X customer — Took delivery in July 1996

Records and firsts

• Most-produced aircraft in history: Cessna 172, more than 44,000
• Refuelled flight endurance record: 64 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes, 5 seconds in a 172, December 1958 to February 1959
• Largest business-jet fleet in the world: Citation family
• First company to build more than 100,000 aircraft, a mark reached in the early 1970s
• First flight of a home-built aeroplane in the American heartland claimed for Clyde Cessna, June 1911