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Two big Pratt PT6A-67A engines, each developing 1,200 pounds of thrust, turn five-blade McCauley props on Beech Aircraft Corporation’s engineering project, the Starship. The project had started in 1979, prior to Raytheon’s acquisition of Beech in 1980. The aircraft was finally certified, and the first production model flew in 1989, 10 years after the concept started. At a development cost of around $300M and experiencing tough economic times in the late eighties, the $3.9M price of a Starship was prohibitive–especially when considering the Starship’s jet-powered competitors were more capable at similar price points.
The Starship included one of the first, if not the first, implementation of an all-glass cockpit suite of avionics with Rockwell Collins; Pro Line 4 system with AMS 850 flight management.
The Starship also wasn’t Beech’s last engineering project that went much longer and took lots more money than originally planned. Once private equity took over the company and brought in the Hawker brand to form Hawker Beechcraft (HBC), the Hawker 4000 proved once again that innovation comes at a cost. The segment- defining super-midsize 4000 took way too long to certify, and in the meantime, Bombardier brought to market its own super-midsize Challenger 300, which became the standard while HBC toiled in development.
None of that really matters, though. The Starship was awesome. It was one of the last truly imaginative airframe concepts to be certified. A few still remain airworthy, too. I was in awe as an aviation student in college watching Beech’s development of the Starship.
This image was taken on the Sony RX 100 II back in 2013 while visiting the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita. NC-41 was a factory model 2000A, which brought weight increases and per- formance advances to the original model 2000. NC-41 has been with the museum
since Beech donated it in 2003.
June 2024 / TWIN & TURBINE • 29