Cool Planes That Never Made The Cut

The Eclipse 400 is a single-engine, four-seat jet that Eclipse Aviation was just beginning to develop when it went bankrupt in 2009. It had attracted about 30 deposits of $100,000 each, which would-be customers never got back when Eclipse went under. As mentioned in the introduction, the EA400 was a single-engine jet with a lot […]

When it comes to figuring out why airplanes that seemed promising never made it, sometimes, as is the case with the next plane, the Eclipse EA400, it’s easy to say. In the case of the Cessna NGP (for Next Generation Piston!later changed to Next Generation Prop), the answer isn’t clear. Its origins are pretty easy […]

You might know the BD-5 from its jet-powered version, the BD-5J, which we recently featured in a roundup of Very Light Jets. That plane was in a James Bond movie, and several plied the airshow circuit for years. But the BD-5J is more of a novelty than a practical plane. This is not the case […]

When Beechcraft was looking to add a new upscale model, someone in Wichita came up with a bolt of inspiration to build a single-engine turboprop in the early 1980s. They decided it might make sense to convert a pressurized B-58 Baron to turboprop power. When you think about it, the market was ripe for the […]

A far more practical Piper that never made it to market, the PA-6 Sky Sedan had the looks of a really fun family flyer, but it was a victim of the post-war crash in plane building that claimed a number of GA manufacturers that had gone all in on building small planes for veterans returning […]

Toward the end of World War II, Piper, like just about every other light plane manufacturer, figured that the big business it was doing with the government selling liaison planes based on the J-3 wouldn’t last forever, so it planned to transition to a civilian lineup. One of the planes it floated was the Skycycle, […]