This Plane Was Supposed To Usher In The Future, But It Was Such A Failure Its Builder Burned Every Example It Could Find

One of the most striking civil aviation aircraft to ever take to the skies is also one of aviation history’s saddest. The Beechcraft Starship was far ahead of its time with its all-composite construction, canard wing, computer-filled flight deck, and futuristic design. Yet, it was arguably too much, too soon, and few bothered to buy into the future. Its builder was so averse to keeping them around that it incinerated all examples it could get its hands on. Yet, even today, the Starship is still a shocker everywhere it goes, like a Bugatti going down the Interstate.

This year’s EAA AirVenture Oshkosh was largely themed around how the Allies turned the tides of World War II with the help of so many historic vehicles. Lots of military equipment was on display and I’ll never forget standing under the broad wings of a B-52. If there was one thing that averted my gaze, it was the work of the eccentric Burt Rutan, one of the few aircraft engineers alive today who could probably be described as a rockstar.

Nothing Rutan designs could be described as “normal” and one of his most ambitious designs had the potential to change the future of business aircraft. That’s this wonder, Beechcraft Starship serial NC-51.

One of these aircraft landed at AirVenture this year and gathered a crowd larger than some of the air show performers do when they park. I can’t blame these people. This might have been the first and the last time they will ever see a flying Starship. And my, these planes live up to their name.

From A Legend

This aircraft wouldn’t have been a reality without the work of Burt Rutan and his team, and man, his name has been associated with some real beauties.

Rutan is one of those figures who found himself enveloped in aviation at an early age. He was born in 1943 near Portland, Oregon. As a kid, his closest familial connections to aviation were through his sister, who was a flight attendant, and his father, who reportedly gave up golf to fly around a small plane. Rutan took an interest in aviation early on, building models as a kid before one day performing his first solo flight in a real plane at the age of 16.

Those models are part of where Rutan got to experiment with the sorts of mad designs he’s known for today. As Plane & Pilot writes, Rutan took part in model-building competitions where he’d make some of the wildest models that still followed strict rules. Reportedly, Rutan once took part in a competition where model airplanes had to demonstrate how fast and how slow they could go using a tiny aircraft carrier. Rutan went above and beyond, designing a model VTOL jet before the Harrier Jump Jet was even a thing.

Like any obsessed avgeek, Rutan sought to take his dreams further and he graduated from California Polytechnic State University in 1965 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Later that year, he put his education to work as a civilian flight test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base. While there, Rutan worked on the LTV XC-142 VSTOL transport as well as performed spin testing on the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II. In total, he performed about 12 projects on aircraft out there, and then Rutan left to eventually land himself as the Director of Development of the infamous Bede BD-5 homebuilt.

Finally, in 1974, Rutan started to go his own way and opened the Rutan Aircraft Factory. There, Rutan designed such aircraft as the VariViggen, the VariEze (below) and the Long-EZ, some of the most innovative general aviation aircraft to ever take to the skies.

Rutan’s work with these homebuilts helped popularize canard configurations and helped advance composite construction in the homebuilt arena. Not only that but these futuristic planes were designed to reduce the chances of a spin. That’s an aggravated aerodynamic stall where one wing may still be producing lift but the other’s lift is insufficient. The aircraft begins an un-commanded roll and from the ground, it looks like the plane is spinning as it’s losing altitude. Sadly, pilots have still found ways to crash Rutan’s iconic designs.

I think I’ll let Rutan describe his own life from here, from his website:

In 2004 Rutan made international headlines as the designer of SpaceShipOne, the world’s first privately-built manned spacecraft to reach space. Financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, the competition created to spur the development of affordable space tourism.

Rutan designed the legendary Voyager, the first aircraft to circle the world non-stop, without refueling. He also developed the GM Ultralite, an all-composite 100 mpg show car for General Motors, and the Proteus “affordable U-2” aircraft. His Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer broke the Voyager’s record time, becoming the first non-stop, solo flight around the world.

The success of SCALED Composites owes itself to Rutan’s philosophy that the best ideas come from the collaborative efforts of small, closely-knit project teams and an environment unlimited by adversity to risk. According to Aviation Week, Rutan is “a capable manager who has been able to attract technicians, pilots and workers who revel in the entrepreneurial and creative spirit existing at SCALED Composites.”

If I kept telling you about Rutan’s resume I would be here all day. Over his life, Rutan punched out at least 367 different aircraft designs, of which 45 have actually flown. All of them are a bit unorthodox in some way. I think the best way to illustrate this is by taking a look at what Rutan’s firm tried to do with business travel.

The Starship

Let’s go back to the late 1979s. Beechcraft was flying at high altitude on its highly successful King Air turboprop. The manufacturer controlled a full 50 percent of the business turboprop market and like any dominant company, Beechcraft wanted to stay in the lead. However, the King Air was aging at 15 years old. Beechcraft wanted something fresh to keep soaring above the competition.

At the time, Bill Brown was an advanced projects engineer over at Beechcraft. Brown already had experience working with composites from building his own planes, and began to sketch up what a Burt Rutan design could look like scaled-up. Rutan’s homebuilts were small personal aircraft, but what could those planes be like sized up as business aircraft? Beechcraft would reach out to Rutan to design, build, and test the company’s Next Generation Business Aircraft idea.

Reportedly, development on the Starship didn’t begin in earnest until 1979, when Raytheon became interested in Beechcraft. The company would be acquired by Raytheon in early 1980.

Beechcraft knew what it was looking for. A King Air 350 was good for a 360 mph cruise and eight passengers with an empty weight of 9,500. The company wanted its successor for the King Air to seat 10 passengers, cruise at 400 mph, and come in under 12,500 pounds takeoff weight. As the Smithsonian Magazine writes, Beechcraft was looking for a business aircraft with some of the performance of a jet and the operating costs of a turboprop.

Every option was on the table to get it done. The design team considered everything from a traditional turboprop to radical designs involving twins, pusher configurations, to designs similar to what the competition was brewing.

Oh yeah, Beechcraft wasn’t the only manufacturer trying to create the future of business travel. Remember that this happened at the tail end of the 1970s and the early 1980s. This was a time when Americans were concerned about emissions and fuel economy, and not just on the ground in cars. Multiple oil crises made flying thirsty aircraft expensive.

In the 1970s, Bill Lear was working on the Lear Fan (above), a novel lawn dart-shaped business aircraft powered by a pair of Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6B turboshaft engines driving gearboxes to reach a large propeller in the rear in a pusher configuration. In addition to the aircraft’s aggressive profile, it saved weight with its composite construction. Unfortunately, Lear passed before he could finish the aircraft. His widow attempted to get the aircraft into production and while it did fly–on a day the British government recorded as “December 32, 1980” so Lear could get funding that expired at the end of 1980–the aircraft never went into production.

There’s also the Piaggio P.180, a twin-prop with a pusher configuration, a canard, and designed in collaboration with Learjet.

However, financial problems caused Learjet’s then-parent, the Gates Rubber Company, to bail on the project. Piaggio pushed forward with the aircraft anyway, eventually launching the P.180 Avanti in 1990. The aircraft is still in production today and is still selling! As it turned out, manufacturers didn’t even need to get weird with it as other manufacturers found success selling traditional business aircraft in the 1970s.

In 1980, the now Raytheon subsidiary Beechcraft saw its fortunes in the business aircraft market slipping to its competition. Yet, the company paused development of the new plane and didn’t start it again until 1982. The restart was ambitious, too, as Beech wanted the new aircraft, then called the 300A, to be ready to rock in just two years. The new plane would be developed in secret, too.

Early in the development, the engineers landed on a design with two engines mounted in the rear and driving pusher props. The wings would have vertical surfaces at their tips and most importantly, the aircraft would have a large cabin just as Beech ordered. But there was a problem. A sizable aircraft like this was too heavy, so the team decided to go all-in on composites to chop the weight down. Internal research at Beech revealed that carbon fiber was basically a magical material that weighed less than aircraft aluminum but was three times stronger. In theory, the pusher configuration also meant the cabin would be quieter than the typical turboprop.

These decisions were radical all on their own. The aviation world is known more for its incremental evolutions. Just the shape of the Starship 1’s fuselage alone was a big middle finger to convention, but these engineers were then going to build that fuselage entirely out of composites.

Later that year, Rutan’s team at the newly-founded Scaled Composites added variable geometry to the aircraft’s canard and built an 85 percent scale proof-of-concept aircraft with a fiberglass fuselage that wasn’t pressurized. Scaled Composites was founded only just that year by Rutan and Beechcraft scooped it up along the way.

The proof-of-concept aircraft built by Scaled Composites made its first flight in 1983. The development team continued to build prototypes as development continued. Another prototype, NC-1, which was designed to test aerodynamics, made its first flight in 1986. Prototype NC-2 tested the Starship’s avionics while NC-3 tested the plane’s engines and flight management computers.

All of the advancements thus far would be noteworthy for any manufacturer, but this was Beechcraft’s moonshot project and the Starship wasn’t just a new business plane, but maybe the blueprint for the future of business aviation. The Smithsonian Magazine points out how Beech assembled some of the best minds in the business:

The program brought together some of the finest minds in aviation. They included D. Brainerd Holmes, a driving force behind NASA’s Apollo program and now president of Raytheon. Linden Blue and composites guru Ric Abbott came aboard from Learfan; Blue is credited with selecting Rutan’s design. Others involved included Rutan and a handful of brilliant aerodynamicists, including John Roncz, an airfoil expert, David Bernstorf, who led the Beech aerodynamics and loads group, Roy LoPresti, a speed merchant who had wrung the drag out of half a dozen airplane types, and Brown. At its apex, 1,000 employees were assigned to the Starship, 450 of them engineers.

Beech’s parent company, Raytheon, would spend a million man-hours and $350 million (early 1980s dollars) bringing the airplane to market and hundreds of millions more marketing and supporting it. Some estimate that Raytheon sank as much as $1 billion into the program. (Raytheon will not provide an exact number and may not even know what it is.) “The cost was a very nebulous figure to come up with,” says former Beech and Raytheon president Max Bleck. “None of our financial people tried to put a pencil to it.” But almost everyone knew that the numbers didn’t add up. An internal economic analysis by Beech in 1979 concluded that if it sold 400 Starships a year at an after-tax profit of $250,000 per unit, for a total profit of $100 million a year for 30 years, it would generate an internal rate of return of 16 percent at a time when the prime rate was almost 20 percent.

Beechcraft’s money resulted in a number of firsts. The Starship Model 2000, as it was called at launch, was the first business aircraft with an all digital “glass” flight deck, using 14 cathode-ray tubes for its Rockwell Collins Proline 4 AMS-850 instrument panel. It was also the first certified civilian aircraft with a pressurized carbon-fiber fuselage, the first modern aircraft with a canard, without a tail, and among the first passenger aircraft with pusher turboprops.

Now, if you’re beginning to see why this aircraft failed, don’t worry because Beech’s CEO did, too. Then Beech CEO Max Bleck tried to kill the Starship twice, but Raytheon demanded the project move forward.

So, Beechcraft had to try to make some lemonade from the lemons it was delivered. The Starship was announced to have a target price of $2,742,500, which shocked the aviation world. If the Starship hit as promised, it was going to change the world of flying.

Swing And Miss

The Starship’s development program dragged through the 1980s as its many technological advancements presented roadblocks and speedbumps for engineers to overcome. After all, Beech was trying to do something that hadn’t been done before.

The aircraft that gained FAA certification in 1988 wasn’t exactly what Beech ordered. The Starship was 2,400 pounds heavier than desired, had a gross weight of 14,900 pounds, and it somehow lost a few seats along the way. The heavier weight meant the engineers couldn’t go with the desired 750 HP engines and instead, they had to spec the aircraft with more powerful 1,200 HP Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A67As. Cruising speed was also slightly lower than desired at 385 mph. Just 11 examples were sold in the three years after the aircraft was introduced after certification.

Oh, right, then there was the price. In 1989, Beechcraft wanted $3.9 million for a Starship. By the early 1990s, the price crept up to a whopping $5.3 million, double what it said it said the Starshift was going to cost during development.

The Smithsonian Magazine continues, pointing out that development took so long that company brass just wanted to get the darn things for sale already. This led to Beechcraft getting the aircraft certified before all of the kinks were worked out. The aircraft had pitch sensitivity that was far too light and roll sensitivity that was far too heavy. Beech figured it would fix this stuff as it went on. Unfortunately, while Beech got the fundamentals right, early Starships were plagued with issues, from Smithsonian Magazine:

The results were disastrous for the aircraft’s early reputation. While Beech had gotten most of the difficult new technology right—from the avionics to the composite structure to the variable-sweep canard—it had let a lot of mundane, old-technology things fall through the cracks. The first production Starship, NC-4, was delivered to a Florida-based beer distributor at the summer 1989 Paris Air Show. The air conditioning on the airplane failed repeatedly. Other common problems included door seal failures, defects in bleed air valves supplying pressurized air, and bad brakes. Starships were tarred as “hangar queens,” and one exasperated operator took a Beech executive to lunch and ordered a special centerpiece—a bowl of lemons. Beech eventually fixed these problems, and airplanes with later serial numbers had few if any problems, but in the death-by-whisper world of business aviation, the damage was done.

“What killed that airplane was the reliability issue,” says Tom Carr, who flew 30 of the 53 units produced and logged hundreds of hours training customers. “Once it got that reputation, it was hard to sell airplanes.”

If none of what you read above was enough to convince you the plane was a failure, Beech also had another problem. The Starship’s biggest competitor was the King Air it was meant to replace. The King Air was a proven airframe known for reliability. Sure, it wasn’t a fancy composite beauty, but a King Air owner knew their air-conditioner was going to work. Oh, and you could have configured a King Air to carry more people, too.

Upgrading the Starship to 2000A specification, which slightly reduced cabin noise and increased short-field performance, didn’t help. Sales were so bad that in 1992, Beech said it would kill the Starship if sales didn’t pick up by the time the 50th production example left the line. Sure enough, sales never picked up and the last Starship, serial NC-53 was built in 1995. Beech didn’t even sell all 50 of the production examples.

If you need another example of how much the Starship was an albatross on the neck of Beech and Raytheon, the latter company learned that supporting the handful of people who bought the planes was too much. In 2003, the company began scrapping and incinerating any Starship it could get its hands on. In 2004, Raytheon wanted to be done with the Starship so much that it sold 12 semi-trailers worth of parts to Robert Scherer, the owner of N514RS, for a fraction of their $38 million worth. So while there aren’t many Starships out there, there are still parts out there to keep them flying.

It’s a shame because reportedly, the Starship was a remarkably stable plane to fly. However, it wasn’t as quiet as it should have been, wasn’t as light as it should have been, wasn’t as cheap as it should have been, and overall missed basically all of the targets set by Beechcraft. Reportedly, the funky wing configuration didn’t deliver the proposed efficiency benefits, either. Remember, the whole reason behind going with composite construction was for lighter weight!

Yet, despite all of that, it’s hard to deny the star power of a Starship. Nobody cares what the plane was or was not able to do when it rolls up the taxiway. Starship pilots have stories of being paced by fighter jets just so the jet’s pilot can get a picture. Starship pilots have stories of landing to crowds and the kinds of fascination from people of all ages like when someone shows up to a car show in a supercar you never knew existed in real life.

Owning a Beechcraft Starship must be like owning a Vector. Sure, it may not be the best performer in any measurable way, but people are definitely going to remember your ride more than the McLaren of the week. I know I was pretty much starstruck at the sight of the Starship at AirVenture.

It’s believed that just six Beechcraft Starships remain airworthy. The rest were either burned up, scrapped, are preserved in museums, or sit somewhere being cannibalized for parts to keep the others flying. That means if you see a Starship flying, it may be the first or the last time you ever see one flying again. And while the Starship may have been a failure, it still goes down in history as another example of one of the craziest civil aviation planes ever put into production. Hopefully, they’ll continue to gather crowds for years to come.