Among the reasons to be proud on Fourth of July

By James Fallows
First flight of Cirrus Design's new jet, shown on maiden trip Thursday morning in Duluth: Background and info here from AVweb, source of the first photo, and here from Aero-News.net, and here from Cirrus itself, source of the second photo. And for background on the Cirrus story, your best source remains this. I saw a hush-hush mockup of the plane in a hangar at Cirrus headquarters 22 months ago. Congrats on what is, for the business, very rapid progress toward first flight. USA! USA!

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http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2008/07/among-the-reasons-to-be-proud-on-fourth-of-july/8124/