TQ........xmas gift :ok: :}

And while I am at it, I am sure you really mean the calls required such as TAXI and lineup/rolling etc, I thought departure calls went out some years back. Either way you want to hear something from them. What about all those machines sans transponder :eek:.

You don't know what you don't know!:uhoh:

Let's not forget that the TAS fitout and the airframe were the specific choice of the client - Qld Health.

Ask the Flt Nurses (remember them in the back that are the point and purpose of the exercise) which they prefer - the arse-wagging nauseating Plastic Crap:yuk:, or the rock-solid Kingair?

They did - the Beech Starship.

Brilliant concept, economics looked good. 53 built but ahead of their time and very few were sold. Beech scrapped the final airframes and are trying to buy back the remaining Starships in service to avoid the cost of supporting the remaining aircraft.

http://rps3.com/Images/Pages/Starshi...012x9%20lg.jpg

I had a private tour of the Starship when it was visiting Brisbane on a sales tour in the early 90's

Fabulous looking thing

It's a real shame they weren't a success. I think they were way heavier than had been hoped, and not quite as quick as expected.

A lot of the problems were fixed with the 2000A version, but by then it was too late, unfortunately

A Starship would look great with a couple of turbofans on the back, but I guess you'd never be able to slow the thing up then.:ok:

I only caught a glimpse of it, but there looked to be one or something similar with its rear end hanging out of a maintenance hangar at Caloundra a few weeks ago.

I swear it was a jet Cannard of sorts....Had N rego so not local.

Anyone know what it was?

RV27?

BC :cool:

Jaba - that is a starship - purchased by an engineering school I believe for next to nothing in the fire sale of the frames. Not flyable or registered as far as i'm aware.

A few of em still fly around the world, but your on your own with only parts available from other scrapped ones.

That Rascal puff beat me to it.

Indeed that sad looking starship was purchased by the Engineering school at CDR. Happy to be corrected but I was told that the donks were sold for more than the airframe.

Sadly, an aircraft built before its time, the only hope now is the Avanti, which, I am happy to admit, arouses me somewhat, and I do recall a PV callsign on trial earlier this year to the RFDS Qld Section.

Straight Home and don't Spare the Horses

Thanks folks,

I was worried the AVGAS fumes were affecting my vission and rational though.....no second thoughts could only have been vission.

Sure looks like an awesome machine. Mags due for service in a few weeks so I might have to take a walk while I wait for them to be done, if they will let me in.

I don't think the Avanti will be up to it long term, so back to the Kingair PC question it is...;)

Yes back to the core subject as we won't see an Avanti here doing Aeromed anytime soon:)

'jaba' I think it's more than Avgas fumes effecting yr brain mate:E

Shame the Starship didn't go anywhere, so too speak. Two things killed it I'd say.
Cost, it ended up costing more than Beech had envisaged due looooong overruns on productiontimes etc. The other thing was people sometimes don't like change. By that I mean it's different, you bought one you took a risk.You buy a Beech or Cessna, no risk there, common as mud, easy to sell. Sure it had some advantages over the current days machines but it's like being able to buy a Mackers burger anywhere in the world,their burgers are the exact same burger all over, known, dependable & comforting, those human traits didn't exist in the Starship & perhaps they never would have, we'll never know now.

Take a look at the B747, Bill Allen the president of Boeing at the time (60's) made a huge gamble building that plane & it still looked conventional but he still would have had many a sleepless night during it's production purely 'cause it was different (by way of size etc).
We may see something similar to the Starship in the future but not in our time I'd believe
For now we have the two foe's, the Beech with it's 2 engines for SAFETY & the PC for it's economy for doing the same task, but at a cost.


Wmk2

Further to what my esteemed college (eocvictim) is saying about the 'pig' not being suitable for the RFDS. Apart from the cost of operating a new type with all the associated hassles/costs for spares & Mech's etc. a few of us drivers & spanner wizards where sitting around getting coffee d up for a long nite ahead chatting about the 'pig's use as an Aeromed machine for the Aussie environment. So apart from it's limitations as mentioned already we so called 'experts' got onto the subject of that funny thing sticking out the side up front of the 'pig'. The canards. We could just see it now.

Scene: Nite, poor lighting, type ('pig) not long in service, location dirt strip in some god forsaken outback place. Ambulance drives into the parking area where the 'pig' awaits in haste due the urgency of this mythical case & slams into the canard accidentally................OUCH!!! Poor bugger (driver with good intentions) wasn't expecting to have something sticking out of the plane in that spot. Driver meant well but right there & then scraped a 'pig', well for the foreseeable future anyway.In a nut shell, too delicate an Aeroplane for Aeromed ops in the bush was the opinion:) Besides apart from the Wright Bro's having a canard at the outset of this madness(aviation) the idea has only been touched on a few times in the last 100 yrs so it's obvious to most manufacturers that it ain't the way to go .


Wmk2

The "Gravel Kit" for the pig is purely documentary - ie, every non-bitumen landing counts as two landings. This makes it a inter-hospital only platform. Qld RFDS actually quite liked it, it was somewhat more roomy than a Citation, quicker than a B200, safer than a PC12 (QH requirement for 2 engines) - it was a two-stretcher setup as well Ecovictim - but a jet just makes more sense than starting an otherwise orphan type in a pretty heavy workload environment.

dream on
 

Its not rocket surgery. The pig was never being considered for operations in the bush on dirt. It's merely a faster option for longer legs to save the BE20 for the shorter stuff.

............ahhh like the PC12 gets used for up and down the Qld coast.

They may still stick with the pc12. They may not like the set up it has.

Sounds like the dollar has spoken!;)

I seem to recall that RFDS WA tried an Avanti for patient transfer operations. For the aforementioned reasons the aircraft is not suited to emergency recovery work but has the speed for distance work. This was a couple of years ago now, I think. Dunno what the outcome was.

As for the Starship the problem was that it was a composite construction and the FAA had heart failure over the issue of fatigue life. Nobody could put a figure on it so the FAA decided that the airframe had to be overbuilt to bu@@ery and as a consequence the weight killed all the proposed performance specifications. However, some of the lessons learnt from the exercise went into the Premier 1A and Hawker 4000 jets.