General aviation manufacturers saw a year of changes in 2007. Cessna Aircraft Company bought the bankrupt Columbia Aircraft Manufacturing for $26.4 million. Cessna then promptly rebranded Columbia’s planes the Cessna 350 and Cessna 400 to sidestep a trademark infringement lawsuit. The sale, at auction in a federal bankruptcy court, briefly attracted Cirrus Design and two other companies. It capped off a tumultuous year for Columbia, which went through two rounds of furloughs. Columbia halted production for several weeks after problems with the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit that affected other GA makers as well. With the purchase, Cessna hopes to compete with Cirrus for the composite single-engine market.

The first new bush plane in 20 years got its certification in May. The Kodiak Quest was designed with humanitarian organizations in mind, and it already has 50 orders from groups that plan to fly it throughout the world. The plane’s backers are now trying to round up more money to start production next year and line up commercial and government buyers to help make the plane pencil out. Designing the plane cost $40 million, and the company is planning to sell the turboprop Kodiak to humanitarian groups with no markup above the actual production cost.

Very light jets became somewhat more common, though so far it has hardly been the explosion of new aircraft in the skies that many observers predicted it would be several years ago. DayJet became the first air taxi operator to start using the Eclipse 500 and now reaches nearly three dozen airports in the Southeast, with plans to keep expanding throughout the region in the coming year. Eclipse announced it would develop a single-engine version of its plane as well. And Epic Aircraft, with a fresh infusion of $200 million from an Indian aviation tycoon, is set to launch a massive expansion of its manufacturing facilities in 2008 as it continues to move forward with certification efforts for several of its turboprop and jet models.

The FAA took plenty of flak from general aviation groups, Congress and other government agencies this year. The agency’s vision of funding through user fees got a tepid reception in Congress, though the U.S. House and Senate deferred passing a four-year spending bill for it until sometime early in 2008. The FAA collected some kudos for shrinking the size of the Washington, D.C., Air Defense Identification Zone, making it a constant 30-nm radius around National Airport. That reduction from the old “Mickey Mouse” shape made it 1,800 square miles smaller and meant 33 airports were no longer under it. Another FAA initiative, privatizing and consolidating the nation’s automated flight service stations, met with much more difficulty. Lockheed Martin, which won the multi-million dollar contract for the work, botched installing new networks and computer systems throughout the first half of 2007. That meant long hold times for pilots, countless dropped flight plans, and connections with briefers on the other side of the county who didn’t have access to the right information. By late summer, Lockheed seemed to have worked out most of the difficulties and the number of complaints from pilots had dropped accordingly.

As of Saturday, the National Transportation Safety Board had recorded 1,484 accidents involving Part 91 general aviation flights in 2007. Of those, 270 were fatal accidents. That compares with 1,466 accidents in all of 2006, of which 301 were fatal. In other words, while there were fewer GA accidents this year, a greater proportion of them were deadly. Commercial aviation continued its widespread safety streak, though runway incursions attracted plenty of media attention as they spiked to their highest levels in seven years. The FAA tracks incursions by fiscal year. From Oct. 1, 2006 to Sept. 30, 2007, there were a total of 370 runway incursions, compared with 330 in the year before that. Just in October and November of this year, there were a total of 110 incursions.

CORRECTION: This article originally misinterpreted some of the figures. 2007 saw more Part 91 accidents than 2006, but the rate of fatal accidents in 2007 was lower than in 2006.

The transatlantic heavy metal battle between Airbus and Boeing hardly let up in the past year. Airbus, faced with nearly two years in delays and billions of dollars in losses from developing the A380 superjumbo jet, soldiered through with a management shuffle and consolidation of its manufacturing facilities. In keeping with its amended timeline, it delivered the first plane to Singapore Airlines in late October. Meanwhile, after a ceremonial aircraft rollout held together with plastic fasteners in July, the Boeing 787 program has hit several snags. Boeing’s global assembly system, which has dozens of companies in almost as many countries making various parts of the plane, had difficulty getting everything done. The plane’s first flight is expected by spring 2008 and Boeing pushed back the first deliveries of the 787 to November or December.

This year was the worst on record for commercial airline delays throughout the country, prompting the FAA to institute flight caps at Kennedy International Airport in New York. JFK has been the root of many of those delays, with chronic over-scheduling and a lack of runway capacity backing up flights across the nation on some days. Incidents like the Feb. 14 ice storm that shut down JFK and left hundreds of passengers stranded in planes on the tarmac gave commercial aviation a bad name for many. There were some bright spots, though. Ultra low-cost carrier Skybus started up service from a hub in Columbus, Ohio, with flights to airports sometimes far away from the cities it claimed to serve. With the first ten seats on each flight priced at $10, the airline quickly gained a following. Virgin America finally started flying in 2007 out of its San Francisco hub after resolving the federal government’s concerns that too much of the airline was owned by a foreign company. The planes feature seatback entertainment options and colored mood lighting, among other perks. After a false start several years ago with Boeing’s Connexion program,
several airlines this year started testing in-flight wireless Internet access. The trend appears to be catching on, with JetBlue, Virgin America, Alaska Airlines and other domestic carriers launching, testing or expanding the service in 2008. Each airline is handling it differently, with some charging for the service and others providing some options, like instant messaging and e-mail access, for free.