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"Across the Street." The company everyone is watching is what Beech calls the "boys across the street." Cessna's President Dwane Wallace has built a young, eager outfit with plenty of stress on foresight and imagination. At Beech, less than half the executives are pilots; at Cessna, everyone down to middle-management level knows how to fly as well as sell.
While Beech still sticks to relatively high-priced planes, Cessna is moving all around, adding new planes to complement its five single-engined models ($9,000 to $16,850) and its twin-engined Model 310 ($60,000). In the future Cessna hopes to shine even brighter. One important project is Cessna's YH-41 light helicopter, now undergoing tests for the U.S. Army; eventually Cessna hopes to develop a vast commercial market. A second is jets. Last week Cessna landed another $10 million Air Force order for its 400-m.p.h. twin-jet T-37 trainer, booking production solidly for two years. When Wallace decides that U.S. businessmen want a jet, Cessna will be ready.
At the other end of the price range stands Piper, now run largely by the three sons of President Bill Piper. A successful oilman who made his stake in the early Pennsylvania fields, Bill Piper Sr. started business in 1929 and, like his colleagues, often wished, as he almost went broke, that "I'd never gotten into this aviation business." Yet today, with three modern versions of its Cub plus its $34,990 twin-engined Apache, Piper is solidly in the black and ready to expand.
Push from the Bottom. The Big Three's progress and profit is not lost on the dozens of smaller planemakers, who are also learning to grow by selling utility. In barely six years, Oklahoma's Aero Design & Engineering Co. has leaped to a $12 million annual business with its high-priced ($89,500) twin-engined Aero Commander. When the Air Force bought 15, including one for President Eisenhower, so many companies jumped in with orders that Aero expects to sell about 120 planes this year, has built a $6,250,000 plant to boost production. Prospects are so good that even big military planemakers are moving into the market.
Yet for all the activity, the U.S. light-plane industry thinks it has hardly started to climb. Surveys show that there are at least 150,000 potential customers who could gain by flying their own planes. The Civil Aeronautics Administration is already beginning to worry over how they will all fit into the crowded air. So far, the businessman's safety record is good, with only i.i fatal accidents per 100,000 aircraft hours v. a rate of .73 per 100,000 for scheduled airlines. Yet, as more and more planes go aloft in all weather, it may get to the point where the nation's airspace must be sectored off like superhighways, one lane for private flyers, another for airlines, and everything run under strict instrument rules.