The largest of the CitationJet family, and the light jet that appears on our empty leg board more often than any other single type. Live availability first, then what a month of records looks like.
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Most aircraft on this site have a corridor. The Learjet 45XR shuttles between Belfast and London, the Praetor 600 between Larnaca and London. The CJ4 does not. Its repositioning flights scatter across hundreds of city pairs, and the busiest of them, short hops such as College Station to Fort Worth or Fort Worth to Austin, account for only a handful each.
That is what a light jet in general charter work looks like when it is flown hard: sectors of an hour or two, a wide catchment, a fresh destination almost every time. If you are waiting for a CJ4 empty leg on one specific route, expect a long wait. If you are flexible about where you go, it is the type most likely to have something moving today.
One caution on reading the volume. How often a type appears here reflects how many of its operators publish their empty legs, not how many airframes exist. A fleet that posts every repositioning flight will outweigh a larger fleet that posts none.
The CJ4 is one of several types on the board whose operators almost never attach a figure to an empty leg. The record block above says exactly how many carried a price in the latest month. In practice, on this aircraft, the enquiry is the price: there is nothing to compare until you ask the operator who published the flight.
For the aircraft that do publish, we divide price by seats across the whole board in how much an empty leg private jet costs.
Single pilot certified, 2,165 nm of range, a cabin you sit in rather than stand in. Ten seats is the certified maximum; operators usually list eight, which is the number to trust for any individual flight. The CJ4 Gen2 is tracked separately because operators list it separately and its pricing behaviour is quite different. Specification: Citation CJ4, GlobalAir.
The CJ4 is the largest and fastest of the CitationJet line, the family Cessna launched in 1991 to make a jet a single pilot could fly on turboprop budgets. Against the CJ3 it gained a swept wing derived from the Sovereign, more powerful Williams FJ44-4A engines and a longer cabin, and the result closed most of the gap to the midsize class on speed while keeping the operating economics of a light jet. It has been one of the best selling business jets of its size since deliveries began in 2010.
| Manufacturer | Cessna |
|---|---|
| Engines | 2 × Williams International FJ44-4A |
| Passengers | 10 maximum |
| Cabin | 17 ft 3 in long, 4 ft 8 in wide, 4 ft 8 in high |
| Baggage | 77 cu ft |
| Range | 2,165 nm maximum, 1,700 nm on the normal profile |
| Maximum cruise | 451 knots |
| Ceiling | 45,000 ft |
| Take-off distance | 3,410 ft |
| Landing distance | 2,940 ft |
| Maximum take-off weight | 17,110 lb |
Source: GlobalAir.