It was way worse in pistons planes. The citation is so much smoother and flys more level.

I have had a couple sensitive pax who prefer forward facing seats. Even with jet like smoothness and performance.

Happy to compare with much of the Citation line.

I have never been in a Piaggio. They look amazing in pics and on paper. I had a buddy buy one and got his lunch eaten. That being said it could have just been that plane. I have also heard of nightmare citations.

Why do the very few Piaggio guys here always want to compare to Citations? Just enjoy your cool plane and be happy with it. Haha. Do Citation guys go in the Piaggio thread all the time and compare? I don’t know as I have not been in that thread for a long time.

To the OP it’s really hard to follow all the Citation models. I have learned a lot and still get confused. Just need to be a Rainman type person or just ask Mike C. Haha

Edit- just looked at the Piaggio thread and yes there was Mike C posting citation stuff on the second page back. Haha. And some really pretty Piaggio pics.

Mike

Fair enough! In my defense…

A) I just responded to the thread drift about pax who care about forward facing seats. No comparison implied, just that I have had pax who want to face forward.

B) Chip chimed in and implied the Piaggio wasn’t a jet. Which, while technically true, was clearly a bit of a put down…

C) Therefore my aircraft’s honor needed defending!

Jets are nice too.

I've flown a number of planes with rearward facing seats -- including the Phenom 300, Piaggio, and TBM -- and I think the only thing that makes or breaks the rearward px experience is controlling the deck angle. Climbing out at 15 degrees clotheslines your rear-facing px on their seat belts. Maintaining a single digit climb angle is 98% of the ballgame.

As to the jet vs Piaggio debate: I have yet to find a passenger who prefers riding in the Phenom 300 to the Piaggio, and I have taken quite a lot of px in both aircraft. The Piaggio has much bigger seats, a lower cabin altitude, is quieter, is smoother in turbulence, and only about 8-15% slower. Granted, the Phenom has better range, but most folks I fly around would rather take the fuel stop. I get that people would take an "economy" seat over a business class seat to step up from M 0.8 (commercial jet) to M 2.0 (concorde), but it's more of a pill to swallow when the benefit is only 0.1 - 0.15 M.

Au contraire Chip….unless you have a Citation 10 the Piaggio is better….cabin is much larger and quieter than the small tube Citations..

Oops, sorry.

Now about that comparison again…

Au contraire Chip….unless you have a Citation 10 the Piaggio is better….cabin is much larger and quieter than the small tube Citations..

I was just talking cabin size.

When the Citation does 370 knots at 500pph (and comfortably hold 8) ... I will proclaim them better lol.

Ho hum.





Robert T

I was just talking cabin size.

When the Citation does 370 knots at 500pph (and comfortably hold 8) ... I will proclaim them better lol.

Chip, I think this is the #1 misconception about the Piaggio.

Take me: I'm a slightly more than 1,000-hr TT pilot who is the executive chairman of a publicly traded company I founded; I have a 2-year-old and 3-year-old (& 2 dogs). I am so busy that I count it a win on days I get a real shower. And owning and managing a Piaggio is easy for me, no more difficult than the TBM I previously owned. (All the work was pre-purchase: Piaggios are so cheap, I was confident I was missing something, and I had to do a zillion hours of due diligence to convince myself I wasn't.)

I think the true challenge the Piaggio has is that its capabilities are so far beyond other turboprops that it takes a "pilot's pilot" to appreciate how capable and amazing the plane is, and *why* it's such an outlier performance-wise. Most people write it off because they think turboprops aren't capable or aren't safe, or the owner is compensating for ...[Barack Obama hand gesture]... that requires their plane to have jet engines. I mean, the plane was certified in 1990 and there's been one fatal accident. Citations can't touch that (but it's not undertstood).

In addition, the Piaggio doesn't fit properly into the jet card market: it's the size of a mid-size jet, it performs like a light jet, but it's quieter and better pressurized than either. How do you charge for that? And, finally, of course, having Avantair as a big customer was a terrible mistake.

And, in an ideal world, it would use less runway. That's about it.

Ed

Ed, unfortunately Piaggio always approached the P180 with European mindset - 2 crew approach, sell to institutional buyers (ambulance, military etc) and when they did sell to the business crowd, they approached it as a jet "but with less fuel burn". They just didn't understand the US market very well and made strategical mistakes. A fractional owner, looking to impress and arrive in style for a business meeting, isn't gonna wanna come in a creature-from-the-deep-looking "propeller" plane. They want a jet.

What they should have done is marketed it to the owner-operator crowd, people who pay their own bills and know the value of money. But those don't exist to the same extent in Europe, so they probably didn't realize how big that market is here. No, they should have pushed hard on SP, its capabilities and sold it as a turboprop with jet speeds, rather than a turboprop pretending to be a jet. In the last years before they went bust, they started to figure that out by pushing for the "Ferrari of the skies" spiel, but that shoulda been in place from day one.

Well marketed, well supported, this could have been the biggest selling TP in the world for owner operators. There is no reason it couldn't have had the same market success as the PC12 or TBM did. It deserved it. Still today, it's miles ahead of all the rest. A marvel of design.

But better late than never.

Extremely well stated!