Wednesday, April 03, 2013


I saw this in Aspen and wanted to share, because it's freakin' AWESOME!

This is a ~30-year-old Beech Starship, one of 53 made, and one of the 5 remaining privately-owned and flyable machines.  This machine can do 300 knots and climb to 41,000'.  It's made of composite materials and obviously has a very unusual design.  It has a canard, no tail, and pusher props. It also had the first all-glass cockpit of any business aircraft.

The thing is a lot bigger than I thought it would be - it's like Hawker 800 size.

Very interesting blog post on the Starship here:

 http://achtungskyhawk.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/rare-aircraft-beech-2000-starship/

Here's a shot of the cockpit instruments.  So many screens!  This was taken from  http://www.bobscherer.com/Pages/Starship.htm - the web page of the guy who owns the Starship I saw yesterday.



Here's a video I took:



More pics of this rare bird.



Also, here's Nolan on a swing :)






3 comments:

Paul Tomblin said...

There was a time when one of these would come into Rochester about once a month or so. My non-pilot friends would say "I saw the strangest airplane the other day", and without waiting for the description, I'd say "Beech Starship", then they'd start to describe it while I'd pull up a picture of one on the phone, and they'd go "that's it!

LocalFlightEast said...

thta has got to be the freakiest looking thing I have seen.
the plane ... not your son ( sorry!)

Anonymous said...

It's alos there on Google Maps's Aspen map... :)

https://maps.google.de/maps?q=aspen&hl=de&ll=39.228351,-106.867876&spn=0.003835,0.006539&hnear=Aspen,+Pitkin+County,+Colorado,+Vereinigte+Staaten&t=k&z=18