In the year since Textron Aviation unveiled its new $4.8 million Cessna Denali single-engine turboprop here, both Textron and engine maker GE Aviation have made steady progress toward a projected first flight in next year's fourth quarter. Brad Thress, Textron Aviation senior vice president of engineering, and Brad Mottier, vice president and general manager BGA, GE Aviation, recently gave an update to AIN on the program's progress.
Thress reported that just over half of the aircraft's 7,500 detailed airframe and systems parts have been released into the factory, approximately 4,000 parts total. From that number, about 10,000 parts have been manufactured, including multiples of certain part numbers. “Some of the larger components are coming to fruition, which is always nice to see. We've got the cabin door complete and the large cargo door completed, and those are going in a door test article. Just a couple of days ago we had our first fuselage skin come out of the metal bond shop, so the fuselage skin runs back from the cockpit to where the empennage starts. It's a really large assembly so it's exciting for our folks to see that. So a lot of good progress on the airframe design,” Thress said. “We're generating actual airplane parts and that's fun. You have that time early in a program where you are doing a lot of stuff on [engineering drawing software] Catia and on paper but you are not seeing parts flow out, so this is an exciting time for us so we are staring to see large assemblies come out of the factory and into full-scale test articles.”
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