Yesterday's Futures I - The Beechcraft Starship

Sometimes, the future doesn't arrive. Or rather, the future that was expected doesn't arrive, and designs that seemed futuristic at the time turn out to be dead ends, poignantly trapped in a bubble of retro-futurist irrelevance.

When Burt Rutan won the X-Prize in 2004 with Spaceship One, it was obviously the prize-winning craft itself and its strange looking carrier aircraft, White Knight, which were soaking up most of the attention.

Spaceship One, carried by White Knight One, with a Beechcraft Starship as chase plane

A closer look at the chase aircraft being used during the historic flight, however, would have yielded another oddity: the Beechcraft Starship, a 1980s future which had failed to materialise. With its twin turboprops arranged in "pusher" configuration, its lack of a central tailplane, and the canard wings on the nose, this curious aeroplane didn't look much like the bland corporate vehicles with which it had been meant to compete.

A closer look at the Beechcraft Starship

The Starship was radical in construction as well as appearance, being built from carbon fibre composites by Scaled Composites, and had advanced avionics - a so-called "all glass" cockpit, without electro-mechanical instrumentation. This is the standard configuration of modern airliners, but at the time was revolutionary. The Starship was the first civil aircraft certificated with the "all glass cockpit", or wirh composite construction. It was meant to be the next generation of executive transport.

More images of the Starship in this video slideshow

But it failed. Only 53 were ever built - the first production aircraft flew in April 1989, but over the next 3 years only 11 were sold and by 1991 Beechcaft were offering them for 2-year lease as an alternative to purchase. In 1995 production was ended, and by 2003 the company were actively attempting to remove the plane from service, offering existing operators replacement aircraft and dispatching the recovered Starships to the Pinal Park aircraft boneyard in Arizona for destruction. It may seem curious that they would want to do this, but this was an attempt to reduce the costs to the company of supporting such a small number of "legacy" models.

Short TV item about the Starship.

Much less interesting, but apparently what buyers want: a Beechcraft

King Air, with engines pointing in the right direction and everything.

Beechcraft blamed the failure of the Starship on economic factors, a lengthy development period and higher than expected cost, partly the result of the difficulties of getting such a radical design certificated by the FAA. But they also acknowledged that its unusual appearance may have driven off buyers. People have a good idea of what they think an executive transport looks like, and this wasn't it. Only nine now remain registered with the FAA, of which four belong to Beechcraft. A further twenty or so were sold on privately by the operators of Pinal Park (for a paltry $50k per unit), but these were intended to be cannibalised for parts, and only one was susequently returned to operational use.

As to why this forgotten aircraft turned up two decades later as a chase plane for Spaceship One. The most obvious one is that its unusual appearance (and name) fitted with the space project, and there are also some technical reasons mentioned in the video above. Perhaps there sentimental reasons as well; Scaled Composites, Beechcraft's partners in this fascinating but failed venture, were also the company that built Spaceship One, so the Starship was part of their past, even if it had failed as a future.