I think that if I had that sort of money to spend, I'd start by spending some of it on a real expert to identify the mission profile, and narrow it down to what will best do the job. Likely to be a few thousands very well spent.
I suspect that the right answer will be a single or twin turboprop, but this is the sort of thing that wants assessing as if you were buying it for corporate use - where you'd certainly do a proper needs / capability study like that, so I may be wrong.
If I was doing the study, I'd start by looking at...
- Payload and range envelope required.
- Any speed on route minima?
- Main operating theatres. That allows you to look at maintenance support, fuel availability, weather protection....
- If there's a particular pilot or pilots to be used, and their licence / medical states.
- Range of airports wish to be able to used
- Initial and ongoing budgets available (not forgetting subsequently that this needs to cover maintenance, hangerage, type-rating costs....)
That would allow a few days work to narrow it down to a handful of types. At that point, you can start thinking seriously about aesthetics.
There are people who have the skillset for doing this sort of evaluation - the military always have a few people, usually aero-eng graduates with subsequent training, on-tap for just such purposes, but clearly a fair number of those have escaped out into the private sector.
But starting with the "gut feeling" types, and then evaluating whether they're the right fit or not is, to my mind, a purchasing equivalent of navigating map to ground.
G
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 9th Feb 2015 at 11:19.