The press release arrived in my inbox on May 11. Textron Aviation, the headline said, “celebrates” the Cessna Citation Mustang with its final delivery. With that, a page in light jet history turned. Production has ended for one of the most popular light jets ever manufactured, with some 472 Mustangs having gone through the assembly line in Independence, Kansas. Over its 12-year production run, the Mustang ruled the step-up market and attracted a new customer demographic, among them many pilots who previously flew complex piston singles.
“The world’s most popular entry-level light jet,” said Rob Scholl, senior vice president of Cessna sales and marketing. Scholl went on in the celebratory vein, praising the ingenuity and pride that went into the airplane.
Maybe all these celebratory mentions were Freudian slips on Textron’s part. Sales of the Mustang had been slipping in the past five years, with some quarterly reports showing single-digit deliveries—low single digits. With sales so low, any advantages of buying vendor-supplied components at volume discounts went out the window. Strong competition from the newer Citation M2, introduced in 2013, also cut into Mustang sales. Now the bigger, faster M2 is Cessna’s entry-level offering.
Maybe the Mustang was too popular. “Nearly 50 percent of all Mustangs sold were built in two of its 12 years of production,” says Cyrus Sigari, CEO of the sales, acquisition, and delivery firm of jet-
AVIVA. Those two years were 2008 and 2009, the first years of the recent global financial crisis. Before then, Sigari says Mustangs were selling at $700,000 or more above the then-factory price of $2.5 million.
Today, he says that preowned Mustangs can be bought for $1.5 million. Oddly enough, this may increase demand, and make them more desirable than other, newer entry-level jets. There won’t be any more new Mustangs, but a new kind of Mustang sales resurgence may be in the making.
—Thomas A. Horne, Turbine Pilot Editor
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