The Beechcraft Starship is a futuristic-looking United States turboprop-powered six- to eight-passenger seat business aircraft. The design was originated by Beechcraft in January 1980 as Preliminary Design 330 (PD 330). Burt Rutan was subsequently retained to refine PD330 and one of the significant changes he instituted was the addition of variable geometry to the canard (he holds a patent for this). Rutan's California-based design and fabricatio...
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The Beechcraft Starship is a futuristic-looking United States turboprop-powered six- to eight-passenger seat business aircraft. The design was originated by Beechcraft in January 1980 as Preliminary Design 330 (PD 330). Burt Rutan was subsequently retained to refine PD330 and one of the significant changes he instituted was the addition of variable geometry to the canard (he holds a patent for this). Rutan's California-based design and fabrication company Scaled Composites was then contracted to build scale-model prototypes to aid in development.
Work began in 1979 when Beechcraft identified a need to replace the King Air 200 model. After a brief hiatus while the company was being 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. By the end of development, the Starship had grown larger in...
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