Why Cessna Stopped Building the World's Most Popular Plane

The Cessna 172 is the most-produced airplane in history — and for ten years, Cessna refused to build it. Clyde Cessna taught himself to fly by crashing a homemade monoplane over and over on the plains of Oklahoma, and built his company on one rule: a flight is only worth making if it pays for itself. That rule produced the Cessna 172 — more than 44,000 built since 1956. But by the mid-1980s, Cessna was paying over $35 million a year in liability insurance, and after General Dynamics bought the company for $663.7 million in 1985, the entire single-engine piston line went dark from 1986 to 1996. U.S. general aviation production collapsed from roughly 18,000 airplanes a year to 954. Today, Cessna isn't a company at all — it's a brand inside Textron Aviation, merged with its oldest rival, Beechcraft. Every date, dollar figure, and production number in this video is drawn from verified sources. If you're into deep-dive business histories of the companies that built American aviation, subscribe — new documentary every week. #Aviation #AviationHistory #BusinessHistory #GeneralAviation #Cessna