On a 95-degree mid-September day in the Florida panhandle, a Raytheon Hawker Horizon business jet taxied up to a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base, a joint-use facility whose civilian side is the Okaloosa Regional Airport. The "Hawk," as it is called at Raytheon, is a glossy new eight-passenger bizjet to which the Federal Aviation Administration granted a provisional type certificate in December 2004. However, a bit of additional testing was necessary to gain final FAA approval, so the aircraft was towed inside the hangar, where technicians hooked up its two Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines to a pair of exhaust ducts, ran instrumentation cables to a sound-protected, temperature- and humidity-controlled observation booth, and chained the aircraft to a set of anchors embedded in the concrete floor.
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