Textron Aviation unveils two jets at NBAA

An unrelenting pace of new product development.

That’s what’s behind Textron Aviation’s push to roll out new airplanes, including its Cessna Citation Longitude — unveiled publicly for the first time Monday afternoon at the National Business Aviation Association Convention & Exhibition — and plans for the biggest Citation jet ever: the Hemisphere.

“We’re really standing up our group of 1,600 engineers and spending $200 million a year on new products,” Textron Aviation president and CEO Scott Ernest said at a news conference ahead of the kickoff of the NBAA public opening Tuesday.

The Longitude and Hemisphere announcements come about five months after Textron Aviation certified and began delivering its Latitude midsize business jet, as well as upgrades to about seven other Citation business jets in a roughly three-year period.

“You can expect this kind of aggressive investment activity to continue,” Ernest said to a standing-room only crowd gathered on a cold, blustery day at the company’s chalet at Henderson Executive Airport, just outside the Las Vegas city limits.

The first flyable Citation Longitude super-midsize business jet was parked at Henderson airport. That airplane, said Textron Aviation senior vice president for engineering Michael Thacker, will be a test airplane.

First flight of the Longitude is expected in 2016 with entry into service expected in 2017, Ernest said.

Textron Aviation did not announce a launch customer for the airplane, but Ernest said interest in the jet, which has a range of 3,400 nautical miles, is high at the show.

The Longitude, he said, will be manufactured at the Textron Aviation East Campus, the former Beechcraft plant, on a new production line it is installing at the Plant IV location, at 101 N. Greenwich.

When asked by The Eagle whether the company would add production jobs to build the Longitude, Ernest said the company has hired 500 workers in the past year, and that it would be judicious about adding more employees.

“We’re going to continue to do the right thing,” he said.

Expected to follow the Longitude by about two years is the Citation Hemisphere.

That airplane, the exact design of which is still under development, would be Textron Aviation’s largest Citation ever. It would be the company’s first jet to fall under the category of a large-cabin, long-range business jet.

In its 10-year forecast released Sunday, Honeywell predicted 9,200 new business jet deliveries valued at $270 billion between 2015 and 2025. The forecast said more than half of the deliveries, 52 percent, will be for large cabin jets.

Ernest said the company is still gathering information from customers about what they would like to see in the Hemisphere. But the jet will have a range of 4,500 nautical miles and an expected first flight in 2019, he said.

It will be priced at about $35 million, “based upon what the market is telling us,” Ernest said.

Textron Aviation has not decided where it would build the airplane. He said the company is considering its options on where to put manufacturing of the Hemisphere, though he said he “couldn’t be more pleased” with the Wichita workforce.

“Down the road we’ll be looking at that,” Ernest said.

Ernest said the Hemisphere is not a recycled version of the Columbus, a $27 million large business jet that Cessna scrapped at the height of the economic downturn in 2009. The company received $5 million in forgivable loans from both the city and county, and about $66 million in cash assistance and tax breaks from the state to assemble the airplane in Wichita.

“That was shelved many years ago,” Ernest said of the Columbus.

This story was originally published November 16, 2015 at 2:13 PM with the headline "Textron Aviation unveils two jets at NBAA."