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another couple hundred miles and I wish it would go just a little bit higher. But if you want to go farther and higher, you need a CJ3+ and you get a couple of extra seats. I just couldn’t justify the extra cost for the extra seats, and you can buy a lot of extra jet fuel for the price difference. Given that I don’t put someone in every seat, it wasn’t necessary for me. The M2 performance is very close to the CJ3+. The 3+ will go a little higher and climb a little better. The speed difference though, is kind of negligible. It is faster, but not that much faster.”
At the time Keegan was considering moving out of the Baron, he explained that he considered Pilatus PC-12s, King Airs, and Citations, but surprisingly no other companies’ jets.
“In our family, there are four of us. My daughter is fourteen now, and my son will be nine in July, so we have a young family, and a very high percentage of the time I fly myself and maybe two others. It’s rare that someone is in every seat. So, we looked at the King Airs, which have more seats, but my wife isn’t a big fan of turboprop altitudes. We had chartered a bunch of different planes to see which we could live with,” he began.
“I wanted to find something that I could be a true owner-operator [single pilot] and didn’t need a plane to fly to Europe. Flying that far doesn’t fit my mis- sion, and you buy a plane to fit 80% of your missions, which the M2 fits perfectly. I didn’t really look at the Phenoms. What I thought about was that the M2 was pretty new and was a nice upgrade over the CJ1, which was a good size
for us — so I chose it.”
Keegan can talk nearly non-stop about this aircraft and
the others he has flown. Routinely, these conversations happen with fellow aviation enthusiasts in the cockpit,
28 • TWIN & TURBINE / August 2023
Turbines
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