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Speed and Cash: What Will $10,000 Buy?

That’s an early model Cessna Cardinal with Maple Leaf Aviation’s landing gear, cowling and exhaust fairing speed mods. Cruise speed is advertised to increase as much as 12 MPH.

Speed costs money. That’s why few airplanes coming out of the factory were optimized for speed—it costs staggering sums of money to certificate a production airplane and at some point, the engineers and bean counters threw up their hands and shouted, “That’s enough!”  

While the cruel realities of squared functions when it comes to speed and drag mean that to go twice as fast you have to have eight times the power, the fact that few of our airplanes were optimized for speed means that there are some mods that let you bank some more speed without going bankrupt. 

Rick Durden

Senior Editor Rick Durden has written for Aviation Consumer since 1994 and specializes in aviation law. Rick is an active CFII and holds an ATP with type ratings in the Douglas DC-3 and Cessna Citation. He is the author of The Thinking Pilot’s Flight Manual or, How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It, Vols. 1 & 2.