Beechcraft Starship
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NASA-2000Starship.jpg
The Beechcraft Starship is a futuristic-looking aircraft designed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, and produced by the Beech Aircraft Corporation. It is a six to eight seat business transport.
Development cost $300m, and began in 1979 when Beechcraft identified a need to replace their King Air model. After a brief hiatus while the company was bought by Raytheon, full development began in 1982 when Beechcraft approached Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, a leader in the field of novel composite aircraft design. Much of the design work utilised Computer Aided Design, using the CATIA system.
While in development at Scaled, the 85%-scale prototype was the Model 115, and Beechcraft referred to the production version as the Model 2000. The Model 115 first flew in late August 1983. However, this aircraft had no pressurization system, no certified avionics, and had a different airframe design and material specifications to the planned production Model 2000. This aircraft has since been scrapped.
The first full-size Starship flew in February 15, 1986. Prototypes were produced even as development work was continuing - a system demanded by the use of composite materials, as the tooling required is very expensive and has to be built for production use from the outset. The program was delayed several times, at first due to underestimating the development complexity involved and later to over come technical difficulties concerning the stall-warning system.
The first production Starship flew in late 1988.
The Starship was notable for several reasons. First was its all-composite airframe, using high-tech materials instead of the standard aluminum. These materials were in frequent use to varying degrees on military aircraft, but no civilian aircraft certified by the FAA had ever used them so extensively. Composites were chosen in order to reduce the weight of the aeroplane.
Second was its canard design, with the main wings at the rear of the fuselage and the 'tail plane' at the front. The aircraft lacks a rudder, instead yaw control is provided by small fins on the wing-tips.
Third was its use of a "pusher" design, in which the turboprop engines were mounted facing the rear and pushed, rather than pulled the aircraft forward. The pusher design was thought to offer a quieter ride -- the gusts of wind and air off the tips of the propellers would no longer strike the side of the aircraft, as they do on conventionally configured turboprops.
The aircraft also features a 16 tube "glass cockpit" supplied by Rockwell Collins Avionics.
Commercially the aeroplane was a failure, with little demand forthcoming. Only 53 Starships were ever built, and of those only a handful were sold. Beechcraft recently deemed that the aircraft was no longer popular enough for them to justify their support costs, and has since begun aggressively buying Starships for decommissioning in order to cut costs.
Recently, Starship Model 2000A NC-51 was used as a chase plane during the reentry phase of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne.
External links
- The Starship Diaries (http://www.starshipdiaries.com/history.html)
- A Collection of Beechcraft Starship 2000A Material (http://www.bobscherer.com/Pages/Starship.htm)
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