9 Most Beautiful Planes

You might be asking why we would choose the Piper Cub as one of the most beautiful GA airplanes ever. Good question. By all objective metrics, the Piper J-3 is all knees and elbows, a plane that looks like it was designed by committee, with a boxy fuselage, a too-long wing, its belly low to […]

Technically designated the Beech Model 17, this beauty from a bygone era is known almost universally as the Staggerwing Beech. As only a few other planes, it’s named after a design feature—the placing of the lower wing staggered ahead of the upper one. Designed way back in 1933, the plane was born during the era […]

What a difference a few years make, especially when those years were the era of World War II and the world had changed irrevocably. In terms of aircraft design, there’s no better dichotomy to illustrate the change than two Beechcraft products separated by about a decade in calendar time but by eons in terms of […]

The genesis of the Globe Swift is an odd one. Developed from an existing design, the Culver Cadet, the Swift somehow bore only a passing resemblance to its inspiration. While the Cadet was a decent-looking airplane, the Swift is a true beauty. Introduced in the postwar era, the Swift was, in a few important ways, […]

It’s hard to make a twin look pretty. By definition you’ve got to hang those engines somewhere, and sticking them on the wing is about the only thing that makes practical sense with a piston-powered multi-engine model. So the design achievement of Cessna with its archetypal 310 light twin is remarkable. Unlike some models, the […]

A pressurized twin with good speed and great range, it filled a coveted niche and competed directly against Cessna’s pretty 421 Golden Eagle. The pilots who bought a Duke were inspired by its looks. They were the kind of customer who might have a Porsche 911 in the garage at home. They were people who […]

The Luscombe Model 8 Silvaire was produced in an era where there was no shortage of affordable two-seat light planes, including the prototypical example, the Cub. The Silvaire was different, though. In terms of configuration, the plane is nothing unusual. A two-seat taildragger with cozy side-by-side seating, the Silvaire, if anything, was a bit harder […]

The Cessna 195 is one of the oldest planes in our lineup, and its beauty is inextricably tied both to the technology of the era and Cessna engineers’ ingenious attempts to find ways around those technologies. The look of the Cessna 195—dubbed by the company the “Businessliner”—is dominated by a handful of features that are […]

One of the most beloved singles in the company’s long history, the Cessna model 177 Cardinal is proof that beauty isn’t necessarily synonymous with utility. Cessna introduced the Cardinal as a replacement for the somewhat ungainly-looking 172 Skyhawk, but it never came close to that, in part because the Skyhawk is a remarkable airplane, though […]