...friendly burnishing from the marketing department and the lapdog aviation press played along. After all, what are a few knots of exaggerated cruise speed and missing payload among us enthusiasts? We're talking about airplanes, after all, so it's all good, right?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

New-age buyers--the kind who maybe started flying when Bill Clinton was still in the White House--aren't so sanguine. If they drive a BMW or a Lexus, they actually expect things like competent customer service and airplanes that more or less perform as the manufacturers claim. But have the manufacturers sensed this and adjusted their marketing and sales hype accordingly? Mostly, they have, but they still try to slip by a fast one occasionally, which is what Colombia and Mooney are doing at the moment, in our view. In their sales material and Web sites, both are claiming to sell the fastest piston single--Columbia with its 400 and Mooney with its recently introduced Acclaim. Says Columbia on its Web site: "The Columbia 400 is faster than any other certified single-engine piston-powered aircraft on the planet, period."

Like all such ad claims, these seem to have materialized out of the thin air the 400 and the Acclaim need to climb into to deliver the speed they're selling. There's no FAI certification, no Guinness Book of World Records certificate and not even so much as an asterisk explaining the details.

But with two companies hanging the same claim out there like a ripe plum, we decided to pluck it. Just as there can be only one first, so can there be only one fastest. One company must therefore be righteous, while the other is sucking wind or at least spent hydrocarbons from a competitor's exhaust. While were at this comparison, we'll shed some light on what we think are questionable technical claims by both companies that we believe educated buyers should know about.

200 PLUS

We're not sure how seriously buyers take the fastest-piston-single claim, but several have told us they've paid attention to it, if just for bragging rights. We're certain of one thing, however: High-flying, fast-cruising 200-knot turbocharged airplanes dominate the market.

Every manufacturer who sells a significant number of high-performance singles and which offers a choice of both...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.




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