Long-awaited details on Cessna’s standup- cabin, intercontinental business jet came out last week. The Cessna Columbus 850, which will start deliveries in 2014, will feature seating for up to 10 passengers, a wireless network and a four-panel Pro Line Fusion touch-screen glass clockpit from Rockwell Collins, the company said in a news release. Up front, the cockpit will also feature synthetic vision on the pilot and co-pilot panels, autothrottles and an optional heads-up display. The plane will cruise at Mach .80 to get its 4,000 nautical mile range, with a top cruising speed on shorter flights of Mach .85. The range will let go from Chicago to Paris or from London to Dubai without stopping, among many other city pairs. The 77-foot plane’s cabin is itself more than 35 feet long and will allow people up to 6-foot-1-inch to stand up. The plane is priced at $27 million in current dollars, with first flight expected in 2011 and deliveries three years after that. Spirit AeroSystems, another aviation company based in Wichita, Kan., like Cessna, will design and build the plane’s fuselage and tail section, the Wichita Eagle reported. The partnership is unusual for Cessna, which typically builds all the parts for its planes. Cessna is currently at capacity at its Wichita facility and is talking with local governments about expansion incentives. Spirit is also one of the airframe suppliers for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

The cost to transition America’s air traffic control infrastructure to a satellite-based system could be tens of billions of dollars more than the $22 billion it was expected to cost. The new numbers, including $50 billion just for software development and not including new ground stations or cockpit equipment, come from an independent analysis, the Associated Press reported. Last year the FAA awarded a $1.8 billion contract to start installing Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast stations. FAA officials said they hadn’t seen the cost estimate, but members of Congress expressed worry about the large potential cost increase. This news came the same week the FAA released a $68 billion budget proposal. It was effectively a rehash of its failed proposal last year, complete with user fees for all segments of general aviation and a 22-percent funding cut to the Airport Improvement Program. The budget proposal is not expected to make much progress in Congress, even though lawmakers are coming up on a Feb. 29 deadline to their extension of last year’s FAA budget, Congressional Quarterly reported. Congress is expected to simply extend that to either June or September and now appears unlikely to take up an FAA funding overhaul before the November elections. Last year the U.S. House passed a new funding bill without user fees, but the Senate was unable to agree on a matching bill. Last week two senators also put a hold on Bobby Sturgell’s nomination to become the permanent FAA administrator, citing concerns over airport delays and runway incursions.

Five prizes designed to push innovation in small, efficient and environmentally-responsible aircraft will be awarded at a week-long competition in Santa Rosa, Calif., this August. The General Aviation Technology Challenge, organized by the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency Foundation with $300,000 in award money from NASA, will give its top honors to the quietest and most fuel efficient planes, according to the competition’s Web site. Aircraft, including light sport models, will compete in a variety of trials for takeoff distance, takeoff noise, handling qualities and endurance. Five prizes will await the winners. One will go to the plane that is the most fuel efficient, with the greatest payload and speed, with extra points for aircraft that are powered by bio-fuel or electricity. Two prizes will go to aircraft that are the quietest when operating in the airport environment. One prize will focus on safety, with a special emphasis on handling and stall characteristics. And the last prize will go to the winner of a 400-mile race over Northern California with a twist: planes get points docked for using too much runway to take off and burning too much fuel. This is the event’s second year, but the first time that a prize will focus on how “green” the planes are.

Pilots hit with hefty tax bills from the state of Maine are now suing over the issue. At least two pilots have sued, one of whom was assessed more than $25,000 in “use taxes” after regularly flying his plane to a vacation home in the state, the Associated Press reported. Maine can collect the taxes, even if the plane isn’t bought there, if the plane spends more than three weeks inside the state in its first year of ownership. But Massachusetts pilot Steve Kahn, who said he bought his plane in 2002 and has been flying regularly up to Maine since then, didn’t get his first tax bill from Maine until last year. Other pilots have been hit by the use tax as well and are facing bills from $16,000 to $176,000 each. The lawsuits claim the state is interpreting its own tax laws incorrectly and that the assessments are unconstitutional.

Imagine cruising nearly 12,000 miles, from Europe to Australia, in under five hours. That could be the future of air travel 25 years from now if the British company Reaction Engines’ plans come true, the Guardian reported. There are a few catches, though: A ticket on the A2 would likely set you back more than $7,000 and the plane wouldn’t have windows because the surface of the fuselage would get so hot. Engineers envision the plane cruising at Mach 5, or about 3,800 mph. The plane would be exceptionally large, too, coming in at 470 feet, making it about twice as long as a Boeing 747. Its engines would be powered by liquid hydrogen instead of jet fuel, which would release nitrous oxide as their main exhaust. While nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas, Reaction Engines researchers hope to find a way to blunt its effects.

A nitrous oxide test gone wrong that killed three Scaled Composites workers and severely injured three more last year could have been a less serious incident if the company had given the workers better safety training, California’s workplace safety department said last week. Burt Rutan’s company, famous for winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004 with its small, reusable SpaceShipOne design, has already been fined nearly $30,000 for the accident, The New York Times reported. Workers were doing a “cold flow” test of a rocket engine that runs on nitrous oxide and a rubber-based fuel. One group of workers moved behind a 15-foot earthen berm 430 feet from the test site and alerted another group of workers that the test was about to start. But rather than moving to a safe location, several of those workers gathered behind a chain-link fence close to the test pad. It was those workers who were killed and injured. Scaled Composites is appealing its fine and development of the SpaceShipTwo spacecraft has been delayed as a result of the accident.

Seven years after its founding, Idaho’s Quest Aircraft delivered its first two turboprop bush planes last week. The first delivery, made Jan. 25, went to Spirit Air, a charter and air cargo company. The second plane, delivered Thursday, went to the Spokane Turbine Center in northeastern Washington. The nonprofit will provide training in the plane for missionary organizations, the Kodiak’s target group. Quest will sell the Kodiak to missionary groups for only the plane’s actual production cost, making its profits on sales to cargo and other commercial operators. The plane, which comes with a three-panel Garmin G1000 glass cockpit as standard equipment, can take off with only 700 feet of runway and climb at 1,700 feet per minute. It cruises at 185 knots at 12,500 feet and has a range that tops 1,000 nautical miles. Its base price is $1.1 million.

Responding to a slew of crashes in 2004 and 2005, the FAA last week issued special regulations for pilot training in the Mitsubishi MU-2B turboprop. The rules require safety training, a standardized checklist and a functional autopilot. Operators have a year to comply with the new requirements. Pilots must have 100 hours of multiengine pilot-in-command time before they start training in the MU-2 and instructors must have at least 50 hours of PIC time in the MU-2 in the previous 12 months. The autopilot is required for all flight except that in daytime visual meteorological conditions under the new rule. The FAA estimates that the cost of annual recurrent training will be about $2,000 for each MU-2 pilot, in addition to what pilots would already be paying for recurrent instruction.

The 1977 Cessna Cardinal restored by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association over the course of the last year went to a Texas flight instructor. Bruce Chase, based in Longview, Texas, got the keys in a ceremony Jan. 26. Chase has been researching how pilots make the transition between traditional cockpit instruments and glass panels, so AOPA used that as the setup, telling him he’d been awarded a grant to continue his study. When Chase showed up at the airport, he was greeted by the plane, as well as $5,000 for further research. AOPA’s next plane is a 1978 Piper Archer II. The plane is currently getting stripped and repainted and will eventually be outfitted with an Aspen Avionics panel, Garmin navigation equipment and an S-Tec autopilot.

A Paulding County, Ga., commissioner, two developers, a banker and two construction project managers were killed when a King Air C90A crashed near Mount Airy, N.C., Friday. The men were headed for a weekend hunting trip when the plane nosedived and crashed after a missed approach in low clouds, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. John Wesley Rakestraw, a developer and friend of Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue, was believed to be at the controls of the plane. Paulding County Commissioner Hal Echols, developer Steve Simpson, Georgian Bank vice president Robert Butler and project managers Frank Ruggiero and Tony Gunter were also killed in the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board ruled out structural failures and control malfunctions. The plane, which was equipped with a cockpit voice recorder, split in two when it hit the ground, with large sections of the wings and fuselage turning to crumpled metal.