Hawker Horizon

Aircraft Information
Aircraft Make: Hawker Beechcraft
Aircraft Model: 4000
Aircraft Nickname: Horizon
Aircraft Mil Civ Description: Business Jet
Category: Airplane
Class: Multi Engine Land
Engine Description: Twin Engine

First Flown Information
Sequence First Flown:
Date First Flown: 05/19/2004
Location First Flown: KBEC Beech Field, Wichita KS
Who and/or What Organization First Flown With: Darren Gould, Beech flight test

Aircraft Experience
As of: 07/29/2020
Number of Hours Flown: 190
Number of Times Flown: 130
Other Aircraft Models Associated: Raytheon, Hawker, Beech 4000

Recollections: This airplane is probably the best handling business jet I’ve flown. It flew like a dream, with very smooth controls, good stability but not so much that it adversely affected controllability and a cockpit that was dead-simple to operate in. As nice as the machine was, it was a nightmare from a certification/project perspective. Much delayed, it was Beech’s first Transport Category certification and I just don’t think they were ready for the level of engineering required to certify it. That, and the program went on long enough that there was a lot of turnover in the personnel working it.

For me, it was a test pilot’s dream. Though just a “project pilot” (not the lead, that job was accomplished by Kevin Campbell who, as I have mentioned, was the best mentor a person new to civil cert could have) I got to do a lot of the Stability and Control work, field performance (both takeoff and landing), and braking…along with a wide variety of systems and failure-case testing. It was an excellent program in that respect and I enjoyed working with a number of very good test pilots. In the end, I flew “the heck” out of the airplane and may have known it as well as a pilot can know an airplane. All of that was for naught, however, in that I never received a Type Rating. The FAA, like a lot of large organizations, has inertia for days and an administrative decision by an FAA employee meant I wasn’t “qualified” to receive a type rating. There is no less standardized a process than how test pilots get (or don’t get) type ratings. Oh, well.

The airplane was finally certified (after I transferred to Seattle) and sold in some numbers prior to the production being canceled. I still dream of the chance to fly it again someday.