Beechcraft Starship: A Plane Too Good For Its Market

The Beechcraft Starship was the most radical business aircraft of the 1980s, a composite canard pusher turboprop designed to replace the King Air. Unveiled at the 1983 NBAA convention, the Starship was developed by Beech Aircraft Corporation with aerodynamic input from Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites in Mojave, California. Powered by two Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-67A engines and equipped with a 14-tube Rockwell Collins Pro Line 4 glass cockpit, it became the first FAA-certificated civilian aircraft with a pressurised carbon-fibre fuselage. But weight growth, price escalation, early reliability problems, and competition from the Cessna Citation V, Learjet 31, and Piper Cheyenne destroyed its sales case. Beech sold only 11 Starships to private owners. After Raytheon acquired Beech, the company flew most of the fleet to Evergreen Air Center at Pinal Airpark in Marana, Arizona, where they were stripped, sawn apart, and incinerated. Today only four Starships remain airworthy, including two operated by Aerospace Quality Research and Development at Addison Airport near Dallas, Texas. This is the full story of Preliminary Design 330, from the 85-percent-scale proof-of-concept aircraft to the 2003 fleet destruction, and why the most ambitious turboprop ever built was rejected by the market it was designed to revolutionise.