I fly the XL too after coming from DC9 and Boeing 747-4 equipment. The airplane is a Cessna which apparently means rinky dink and poorly made. I couldn't believe what a piece of garbage it is when I went through the type course. Ergonomically speaking it appears Stevie Wonder designed the cockpit.

 

Those are good visuals. Thanks. Now I just need to do well enough at the interview to get a choice in types...

 

The funny thing is that the people complaining the loudest about the cockpit size and design are coming from aircraft four times the size!! (at least) Is the Excel the best thing out there...no, but it is certainly not the worst, especially on the Net Jets ticket. At least it has an APU. The cockpit is certainly small, unless you are coming from a smaller airframe. As far as systems design and cockpit layout, you need to remember that the Excel is just a Citation 560XL, which came from the Citation 500 series of aircraft. All they did is put the larger fuselage on the thing, besides some other minor changes. The original 500 Citations were built to compete with the King Air for the businessman / owner market and that is why the systems are kept simple. Easy to understand and to fix if it breaks. What a concept. So the XL is ceratinly not a top of the line aircraft, but you do need to compare it to similar airframes in order to get an accurate measurement.

 

Even though I generally dislike the XL, I agree it's an improvement over some aircraft...mostly other Citations.

The XL's shortcomings are certainly exacerbated by the way NetJets operates them. In a corporate environment the furnishings/appointments would probably be "tough enough"; NetJets operates these things like airliners. They aren't.

The cabin interiors look shabby very quickly and the cockpits get beat up in no time.

A lot does have to do with perspective. If you're coming from Cessna 172's, the XL looks like a space machine. If you're coming from a 777, it looks like a POS.

However, both the 777 and the 172 fly much better than the XL

 

So the the cabin and cockpit look shabby in no time? Well, how many legs are you guys flying in a day? Several right? There you go. Any airplane is going to look shabby in no time, they way you guys have to operate. I don't care if it is an XLS, Beechjet or Encore. Heck, I bet a G5 would look pretty shabby too if it had to do as many legs in a day as you guys do.
Cessna must be doing something right since the XL/XLS is the best selling citation in the series. The systems are easy/ straight foward. There simply is no 100% perfect airplane out there, all airplanes will have something that we all don't like, or would like to improve about them. I think Cessna is making the right step with the XLS+.

 

I do agree that compared to some larger, more sophisticated aircraft, the Citations seem "rinky-dink", but it sure is nice to straight climb to 450, and meet the Climb Gradients for IFR out of the mountain airports where said sophisticated aircraft are stuck on the ground! (with the Encore anyway)We may not cruise fast, but we sure do climb quick!