"When I came on board here in 1974--if we didn't deliver 600 airplanes a month we thought something was wrong."

Times have changed dramatically since Russ Meyer took the left hand seat as chairman and CEO of Cessna Aircraft Company nearly 25 year ago. Now this will be his last NBAA as pilot in command of the world's leading manufacturer of general aviation airplanes--next January he hands over the yoke to vice chairman Gary Hay, himself a 33-year veteran of the company.

But Meyer will still be very much around. While stepping down as chief executive he will retain the title of chairman. "I will try not to be underfoot," he chuckled. Even as the 3,000th Cessna Citation business jet is delivered at a special ceremony here at NBAA, Meyer maintains his greatest achievement at Cessna has been "keeping a really good team together."

Behind that modesty, though, the steady hand of a 15,500-hour pilot has firmly steered Cessna toward a dual vision of building an unassailable general aviation product line and promoting entry-level aviation at both the piston and jet-engined levels.

"Riding out the decimating circumstances of the 1980s was certainly difficult," Meyer told Show News. "Cessna survived when many didn't. From that position we've been able to grow steadily.

"The expansion of the Citation line has taken place primarily while I've been chairman. We've brought the advantages of business aviation to a very broad range of users with eight models from the CitationJet to the Citation X, and that's been very gratifying. Now we're delivering the 3000th."

But Meyer counts his greatest achievement as something beyond Cessna. As chairman of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association in 1994, he led the industry's successful effort to gain passage of the General Aviation Revitalization Act. It established an 18-year statute of repose for general aviation manufacturers involved in product liability litigation. The result: the resurgence of the single-engined piston airplane market as manufacturers stirred from beneath the massive burden of product liability insurance.

Cessna put a number of its single-engined models back into production and by the end of this year will have delivered some 2,300 in a three-year period--still however, a far cry from the 600 a month of the booming 70s.

"It wasn't as easy as we thought going back into a business we'd been out of for 12 years," recalled Meyer. But he believes small singles are crucial to the future of aviation.

"We all forget sometimes that we learned to fly in small airplanes, and most of us learned our profession dealing with customers, dealers or vendors in that arena. We certainly are excited about the jets, but the real foundation of the industry is always going to be the single-engined learn-to-fly market and getting more people into the business.

"We have 1,000 people at our Independence plant (where the singles are built). They don't have the experience level we do in Wichita as they tend to be younger and earlier in their careers, but they're all going to make their careers in aviation, hopefully most of them here," he said.

"If we are to look at the industry 50 years from now I'd have to believe that getting that law passed and going back into the single-engined market, while not currently listed as our top achievement as Cessna, will certainly be the one I'm most proud of and I think will have the most long-term benefits to the whole industry."

Over the years Cessna has notched up many more kudos: It is the only general aviation company to win the prestigious Robert J. Collier Trophy not once, but twice. The first time was in 1986 for the safety record of the CitationJet, when the 1,500 in service worldwide flew a whole year without a single accident. The second was for designing the Citation X, the world's fastest business aircraft with a sustained cruise of Mach .92. Indeed, no other commercial aircraft except the supersonic Concorde flies that fast.

"I still fly as much as I can and when you fly the Citation X a fair amount you really get spoiled when you don't have 5 in front of the airspeed," said Meyer. "We learned in little airplanes, where it was so cool to get an airplane that would go 200 knots, then the Citation went about 350 knots, and then the Citation III would go 450 to 470. Now we've got an airplane that's always 500 plus at 41,000 ft or above."