Print edition: 
At 1:30 p.m. Tuesday a warning buzz sounded outside the experimental hangar at Cessna's west Wichita manufacturing complex, and the big white door rolled slowly upward. Inch by inch, from dark hangar shade into bright Kansas sunlight, emerged the cream-colored nose of Wichita's latest aviation creation.
Two blue-jacketed Cessna test pilots walked to the Citation CJ4 gleaming on the gray tarmac. They opened the business jet's hatch.
The CJ4 received Federal Aviation Administration certification on Friday, paving the way for Cessna to deliver 15 of them this year, the first next month.
From the hangar, the man who led the team that created this new bird, tall, gaunt project manager Norman Baker, strode out of the hangar wearing a wide grin.
"This is my baby," he said, waving at the plane.
He posed for photos, his right arm draped around the CJ4's nose the way a dad would wrap an arm around a graduating son. The plane had taken up the days, nights and weekends of nearly five years, time sometimes borrowed from his wife and children. "But when you see the plane fly for the first time, it's like watching your child being born."
Bleeding Kansas
Aviation contributes more than 20 percent of the state's general fund, according to the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce.
In Wichita, as Baker and his team worked with FAA evaluators to get the plane certified for flight, the Wichita school superintendent was hoping to avoid laying off hundreds of staff and teachers, especially the young ones with the least seniority.
The governor, while planning millions in additional cuts to the state budget last week, was virtually begging legislators to raise taxes rather than cut schools, road maintenance and social services even more.
The recession has shriveled public service as the downturn hit and aviation companies watched their earnings drop and their employee parking lots empty.
So what Baker was embracing was an airplane that kept at least 400 Cessna workers employed when the economy hurt — even devastated — other models. Cessna and Wichita's two other general aviation aircraft companies have laid off 13,000 people, a blow to the people and economy.
But something about this model kept business going.
When customers canceled orders for other models, and while Cessna canceled its large Columbus model, the CJ4 kept engineers at work, kept workers on the line.
The new plane, designed by Wichita engineers, made by Wichita labor, survived with 150 orders still on Cessna's books. While the recession tore holes in budgets and lives around the world, people in Wichita created an eight-passenger jet priced at $9 million to sell around the globe.
Pilots, Part I
From the left cockpit seat, test pilot Mo Girard, headset switched on, talked through a preflight check with co-pilot Aaron Tobias and air traffic controllers. Then they started the twin engines, one at a time.
"Ready to crank one."
"Starting one."
Engine one started with a high-pitched whir.
"Starting two."
Engine two came alive.
"Ready to taxi."
Engines whined as thrust built.
"Chocks away."
"Clear to the right."
They nudged forward, turned right, taxied to the end of a runway, then pointed south into the wind.
One of the fun features of the plane, Baker had said, was that it leaps off pavement.
"You're going to feel a little bit of a jolt!" Girard said now, his voice teasing as the engines roared to full voice.
The thrust yanked us suddenly deep into our seats. Within seconds, we hurtled 2,000 feet up into cloud cover, then leaped above the clouds into clear blue sky.
Designs and dreams
The CJ4 was conceived around Cessna conference tables six or seven years ago, long before the recession began in 2008.
Had they known the economic meltdown was coming, said senior vice president for engineering Dave Brant, they would have developed the plane anyway.
"These things happen," he said. "We need to keep designing new planes even in the downturns, because we need to be ready for the rebound when it comes."
Before they drew new pictures of airplanes, they talked to customers, who said they wanted a fantastic office in the sky that can travel fast and far with the latest technology and amenities.
"We realized they wanted us to create a plane that would allow business travelers to visit as many as four factories in four cities in one day and get them home that same night," Brant said. And while that traveler is flying, he'll have an on- board satellite phone, a comfortable seat with a table or two to set up a laptop, the latest in on-board Blu-Ray, iPod portable devices, and satellite radio.
Cessna has tried to keep up with changes in customers' desires, some of them practical (more fuel efficiency, more speed, more range), some of which are nuanced.
"In the '70s and '80s, business jets were mostly about prestige, about who could outperform the other guy," Brant said. "Now it's about other things. They want the plane to be another office as well."
Operators also wanted a little more cabin room, a plane that could take off and land on a shorter runway, a plane that behaved with more stability on a runway covered in ice, snow or rain. They wanted a faster climb, and the latest avionics.
Brant and his team wanted to give it to them; the board of directors of Textron, Cessna's parent company, agreed. Development was going to cost serious money; how much it cost, Brant and his managers declined to say.
They set to work, still only on paper or computer screens.
In one way it would be simple: They'd add these improvements and features to the designs of previous CJ aircraft.
But changing the design to that of a 500-mph aircraft can be tricky, especially if engineers decide (as they did) to stretch the fuselage two feet, change engines and avionics and borrow the kind of swept-wing design now on its Citation Sovereign.
"It's not one person that makes this happen," Brant said. "It's literally thousands of people who work together to produce product that comes out of Wichita, Kansas, that's the best in the world."
In its long history, Cessna has built 190,000 airplanes.
Together with Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier Learjet, the three companies build half of the world's general aviation aircraft.
Pilots, Part II
"What engineers do is design on paper," Mo Girard said, banking the CJ4 into a gentle turn. "What test pilots do is grab our pink bodies and don our parachutes and find out if the design is valid."
It's risky enough, Girard said, that, unlike some test pilots who crave a need for speed, he doesn't ride a motorcycle. Motorcycles are too dangerous. "I've got enough risk in my life," he said.
Before he hired on at Cessna he flew fighters for the Canadian air force; he flew nearly every hot-rod plane in the world. This jet, the CJ4, "is a little bit of a hot rod, too." Which is partly why customers will like it.
Where his clean-cut co-pilot Tobias was reserved, Girard was extroverted and groomed like a character from a test-pilot film: shaved head, bearded face, infectious grin, brown cowboy boots, vivid language laced with color. "We're all business during flights," he said of himself and his co-pilot. "When that giant hand comes out of the sky and shakes us around, we need to be ready."
He worries about dangers only a little, he said. But risk is a fact, which is why the first flights are merely high-speed taxis down the runway, lifting the nose slightly off the ground.
Baby steps. Eventually, test pilots like him and Tobias will proceed more rigorously, to steep climbs, heart-stopping stalls, steep dives, and chest-and-tailbone-compressing multiple-G banking turns.
They carry fire extinguishers. They wear helmets and parachutes; they think through every move they will make if they suddenly see that they can't recover the plane from a spin or stall. They first would extend the airplane's "spin chutes" to float back to the ground. If that didn't work, they would turn their bodies in their tight-fitting seats, climb out of the tight-fitting cockpit, and open the cabin hatch, all while trying not to panic. Then they would fall into rushing air.
It's never happened with his planes, Girard said. Not even close, and not with the CJ4.
But, he said, "if you never had a scary moment in your flying career, you haven't flown enough."
Mr. Potato Head
The engineers did not start from zero, Brant said. The reason there is a CJ1, a CJ2, a CJ3 and now a CJ4 is because, like car companies with their varieties of models, they knew they could tweak new models out of the designs of the older models, filling niches for those who wanted a business jet a little different from the others.
"So in the design work, it's kind of like working with Mr. Potato Head," Brant said, because of interchangeable parts.
"We have this basic design. We have this fuselage; for this new model, should we stretch it a bit? Could we come up with a new wing that would let us go a little faster?"
They also quizzed their manufacturing employees and maintenance technicians. They walked the shop floor and visited service centers. "You hear things," Brant said. "For example, from maintenance people, you often hear, 'Does this particular screw really need to be in this little corner? It's hard to get to.'"
Brant encourages his subordinates and his colleagues from marketing, production and service to speak up too, and be blunt if necessary.
"Some of our discussions sometimes can become heated," he said. "Everybody involved wants something a little different."
After months of drawing pictures, they named Norman Baker in 2005 as the group leader.
And they started to build real models.
Pilots, Part III
Test pilots like Girard and Tobias fly maneuvers for hours, then come downstairs, as they call it, and huddle with the designers, tweaking flight controls or wings or tail sections. They watch video, study data from the plane's test-flight computers bolted down in the cabin. They suggest modifications.
"We work together, and we solve the problems," Girard said. Does the plane shudder a bit in a turn? If so, what's the cause, and what might smooth it?
Girard's college degree is in physics, Tobias' is in aerospace engineering, and from their cockpit they redesign the plane in the air, based on what they see, sense and feel with every turn. "We get to use both our head and our hands," Tobias said.
Does it bank smoothly? Do the controls and the flaps and landing gear, avionics, autopilot and all the systems work correctly?
How fast and far can it really go? How does it perform at high altitudes, low altitudes, in hot weather and in cold?
"Every time we take a new plane up we are going somewhere where this airplane has never gone before," Girard said. "Every time we take a new model through a turn, it's the first time that particular plane has gone to that part of the envelope, and we're never entirely sure what's going to happen. Which is why we wear parachutes, and stay on our toes."
By Tuesday, both Girard and Tobias had flown 450 to 500 hours in the CJ4, mostly over the past 15 months, putting it through every stress imaginable. They were one of five pairs of pilots testing the CJ4 relentlessly.
They started some days in the air at 5:15 a.m. and ended those days at 9 p.m., summer sunup to summer sundown; they flew six days a week. And while they were doing that, they and the engineers were working with FAA evaluators every step of the way.
A million parts
Those FAA evaluators looked at every minute detail, Brant said.
Cessna did computer modeling, wind tunnel testing and materials testing. They tested the windows to hold up to bird strikes. And they tested the plane for structural strength and fatigue. They created volumes of data.
Cessna deliberately wore out a CJ4 airframe, taking it through the equivalent of five lifetimes of flight — or 180 to 200 years of service.
Stresses put on the airframe simulate flight from taxi to take-off, including the climb from lower altitudes to higher ones, cruising, descent and landing.
While they were doing their testing and evaluating, they were handing everything to the FAA evaluators. Everyone wrote it all down. The paperwork to certify the CJ4, if stacked on an exceedingly large conference room table, would stack all across the table "and all the way to the ceiling," said Cessna program project engineer Chris Hearne.
Getting a plane certified, Cessna CEO Jack Pelton said, is like getting a million moving parts all moving at the same time in the same direction. Any one part out of the million, if that one part moves wrong, Pelton said, could keep the bird on the ground, perhaps forever, maybe ending a few careers from waste and cost.
Not this one, Pelton said.
Pilots, Part IV
Before he did touch-and-go landings in Hutchinson and then headed back to Wichita, Mo Girard showed his passengers a few maneuvers. He banked the CJ4 into a 60-degree turn, which is nothing to a test pilot; but his passengers, their chests collapsing into their backbones from the pressure of gravity times three, turned momentarily green from nausea.
Then Girard shot the plane upward and eased off suddenly on the throttle. The photojournalist behind Girard, recognizing near-weightlessness, tossed his video camera six inches into the air, and we watched in wonder as it floated slowly into his hands like the lightest of feathers.
"Point-three-G's," Girard said happily. Three tenths of normal gravity. For a few moments, as we hurtled through the sky, we felt lighter than air.
In the landing, Girard slammed on the brakes to show how the new business jet hot rod could stop on the proverbial dime.
Then he taxied to the Cessna hangar.
He grinned at Tobias.
"Did we mention we love our jobs?"
