Textron Aviation has delivered its 500th Cessna Citation CJ4 series twinjet—a CJ4 Gen2—to a customer in the Philippines. The milestone 500th CJ4 delivered this week rolled out of Textron Aviation’s Wichita facility in June. The light jet series has been in production since 2010.

Meanwhile, the CJ4 Gen3 continues its march toward FAA certification, which the company expects before year-end. According to the company, two flight-test CJ4 Gen3 airplanes have logged more than 880 hours to date. 

Unveiled at NBAA-BACE 2024, the Gen3 variant introduces Garmin G3000 Prime avionics and Emergency Autoland. Textron Aviation describes the Gen3, the largest Citation in the light jet segment, as offering the most standard features in its class. It will have a 2,165-nm range, 2,200-pound maximum payload, seating for up to 11 occupants, and 1,040-pound baggage capacity. Like its predecessor, the Gen3 can be flown single-pilot.

“As we look to the future, our focus remains on delivering the performance, efficiency and confidence operators need to succeed in an evolving aviation landscape,” said Lannie O’Bannion, senior v-p of sales and marketing, noting that the figure reflects the CJ4 platform’s track record and customer trust built over more than a decade.

The first CJ4 Gen3 prototype flew in 2024. A second test aircraft, designated P1 and focused on evaluating avionics, human factors, and cabin systems, made its first flight in May 2025.

Against the backdrop of a stable global economy, business jet backlogs grew 20.4% year over year (YOY) in the second quarter, while departures were up 3.2%, according to Global Jet Capital (GJC). At the same time, young preowned aircraft availability dropped, the financier further reported in its second-quarter Business Aviation Market Brief released today.

GJC noted that the business aviation market remained steady overall as global GDP grew 2.3% during the quarter despite geopolitical developments in the Middle East. This global growth is anticipated to remain throughout the year, barring unforeseen significant events. “With steady economic growth and the wealth creation that accompanies it, the business jet market remains well positioned for continued health through the remainder of 2026,” according to GJC.

During the second quarter, OEM backlogs reached $66.8 billion. This comes as deliveries were up by 4.5% YOY in the first half among the top five business jet manufacturers. Book-to-bills remained above 1:1, keeping average lead times between 18 and 26 months. Underpinning the market expansion has been an increase in operations. North America has led this growth, including a 4.9% YOY increase in the second quarter.

While deliveries rose in the first half, transactions of new and preowned aircraft dropped by 19.8% and 7.5%, respectively. GJC said the decline in transactions may reflect delays in reporting rather than a material decline.

Atlantic Aviation has rolled out a new customer rewards program, Atlantic Ascend, which will provide exclusive fuel savings and service fee rebates across the FBO operator’s entire network. According to the FBO chain, with its free enrollment, Ascend will complement, not replace, the company's existing awards program.

“Atlantic Awards rewards individual pilots, while Ascend was built for the organizations behind the flying," said Atlantic chief commercial officer John Redcay. "Flight departments, charter operators, management companies, and aircraft owners now have a way to earn meaningful savings across their entire operation.”

Each subscriber will receive a weekly exclusive list of best-available, non-negotiated fuel pricing at all of Atlantic’s more than 100 locations in North America, including Alaska and Hawaii, offering improved predictability on fuel cost.

The second part of Ascend’s value proposition enables customers to unlock quarterly rebates of up to 15% on service fees such as aircraft parking and hangarage. The automatic savings are calculated based on the number of times a customer chooses an Atlantic facility at airports where there is competition. If they choose Atlantic 50% of the time or more in a quarter at those locations, the rebate levels will escalate as the percentage increases, and will then be multiplied by the number of consecutive quarters (up to three) the customers maintain that level.

Following a beta test earlier this year at select locations, the company is now expanding the program chainwide.

The FAA is accepting public comment through September 24 on a draft update to its human factors guidance for flightdeck system controls Advisory Circular, which would replace 15-year-old AC 20-175. The draft, AC 20-175A, retains the original’s scope of cursor control devices, touchscreens, speech recognition, and dedicated switches and knobs, while adding guidance for aircraft designs and cockpit technologies that have emerged since 2011.

Proposed guidance applies broadly to aircraft certified under Parts 23, 25, 27, and 29, a scope that includes light and midsize business jets, larger business jets, and business and utility helicopters, as well as airliners and other aircraft categories. The most notable addition addresses “emerging aircraft,” including powered-lift and eVTOL designs. The FAA writes that these aircraft “often possess unique designs, flight, and handling characteristics” but that the human factors principles in the rest of the AC “are also applicable to the flightdeck controls” of these aircraft.

The draft also adds a section on multimodal controls, which allow a pilot to access the same function through more than one input, such as a cursor device, touchscreen, and/or speech command. “A possible benefit of multimodal controls is redundancy,” according to the document, since a pilot retains alternate options if one input mode fails.

Aircraft modification company CitationPartners has two slots left in 2026 for its Excel/XLS Eagle transformation program, reserved for fourth quarter financial deliveries, the company said. The program refurbishes preowned Cessna Citation Excel/XLS twinjets with updated avionics, interiors, and paint.

CitationPartners said process improvements and cost-reduction initiatives have cut transformation downtime by 20% while producing savings for customers. The U.S. company is offering discounted inspections for customers who elect concurrent DOC inspections and repairs.

The Eagle program was founded by former Cessna chairman Russ Meyer, his son Russ Meyer III, and former Cessna executives Gary Hay and Joe Hepburn, all of whom worked on the original Excel program. The upgrade replaces a preowned Excel/XLS’s avionics, adds a custom interior and a full repaint, and enrolls the airplane in Textron Aviation’s ProParts hourly maintenance cost program.

In 2023, CitationPartners suggested the Eagle as a lower-cost alternative for buyers who want the Excel’s qualities without the roughly $17 million price of the new Ascend variant. The current price of the upgrade is $1.75 million.

Texas-based M1 Support Services has won a tightly-fought competition to become the U.S. Army’s next Initial Entry Rotary-Wing training provider, surpassing close contender Bell Textron. M1’s bid centered around the five-seat Robinson R66 light turbine single helicopter.

Under the $10 billion fixed-price arrangement, set to run for up to 26 years, contractor M1 will provide all aircraft, maintenance, simulators, flight and academic instruction, and related support services. Training services delivered through the “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contract will be conducted at Fort Rucker, Alabama, phasing out the ageing Airbus Helicopters twin-engine UH-72 Lakota currently in use.

The contract—part of the Army’s Flight School Next initiative—aims to change the way new helicopter pilots are taught, moving to a contractor-owned, contractor-operated solution. This seeks to provide initial training to between 800 and 1,000 Army candidates a year, while consolidating “aviation training functions into a single enterprise framework, replacing multiple contracts with an integrated solution.”

The final contractor decision comes after four key phases of evaluation. M1 formally announced it was pursuing the upcoming contract as a prime contractor back in November 2025, confirming the R66 to be its platform of choice. The fourth and final phase, held in March, also included the AW119T being offered by a Boeing-Leonardo partnership, Lockheed Martin’s R66 proposal, and Bell’s 505 Jet Ranger X bid.

Honeywell Aerospace’s FMS guided visual (FGV) team has now developed 120 of the RNAV H approaches that help pilots fly autopilot-coupled visual approaches to runway ends at challenging airports across the globe. By flying these procedures, pilots receive guidance that helps them keep the airplane stable with minimal bank angles in a consistent, repeatable flight path.

Several accidents have occurred where business jet pilots lose aircraft control during a visual approach in good weather. The purpose of FGV approaches is to give pilots guidance in the form of a visual approach procedure that can be loaded into the flight management system (FMS) and used to fly to the runway end. Honeywell released its first FGV approach in 2023 as an additional database subscription for most aircraft equipped with Honeywell FMS. The $2,000-per-year database provides access to every FGV approach that Honeywell has developed.

While FGV approaches can be loaded and flown either by hand or better by autopilot, it should be noted that these are visual procedures to be conducted in VMC. They are not a substitute for IFR approaches and also not designed to replace a circling procedure at the end of an IFR approach.