The avionics system was supposed to be, "The star of the show," so to speak but was, in a lot of ways, a bit underwelming. There was little or no integration in the presentation since the the glass tubes only replaced the mechanical instruments of earlier designs. Without being fully integrated this doesn't really accomplish much. One thing it does accomplish is use flexibility which allows the pilot to program the system for the way he/or she likes to use the system. The tubes also allow reversionary modes which it valuable.

The system did have an Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) instead of the antiquated spinning mass gyros, a digital bus system, and an Engine Instrument Crew Alert System (EICAS) for system fault notification.

The digital autopilot was superb.

The NAV system (FMS) was, as I recall, DME/DME primary, and VLF/OMEGA. The Starship's I operated did not have GPS! It's a good thing that we operated in the DME/DME environment of the US most of the time because I never had much confidence in the VLF/OMEGA system although I flew this airplane all over the world and do not recall many problems with navigation. When we went over the water we always carried a handheld GPS as a backup. On one occasion while decending into Wichita in clear weather the entire database went to data heaven. It just got wiped out for some reason. We manually reinitialized the system, told it where the airport was and pressed on. When I called Collins after landing and explained what happened their comment was, "That can't happen." We never experienced that particular problem again, but on another occasion while flying between Reykjavik, Iceland and Stavanger, Norway we found that we could not input into the FMS. When we departed Stavanger for Copenhagen everything worked just fine.

The Starship had swept wings. Rather unusual for a turboprop. Swept wings, of course, reduce drag by making the wing think that it is thinner than it actually is. The swept wing on the Starship also provided the required longitudinal (pitch) stability due to the fact that the aerodynamic center of the wing is placed aft of the CG.

The Starship is essentially a flying wing. Longitudinal stability is provided by the main wing. The "horizontal tail", or canard surface is placed in front of the main wing. This does two things: it provides a constant upload to balance the negative pitching moment of the wing and, provides pitch control through an elevator on the trailing edge. The canard is actually destabilizing and so does not contribute to longitudinal stability.

The swept wing also allowed the vertical stabilizers, which Beech called Tip Sails, to be attached to the wing tips. This mounting placed these surfaces at the correct position to serve as stabilizing surfaces and rudders as in conventional designs. The Tip Sails are canted in six degrees so that the lift vector passes through the vertical CG of the airplane to all but eliminate any roll due to yaw effect during an engine failure.

The movable surfaces on the trailing edge of the wings at the tips were elevons which provide lateral (roll) control by deflecting differentally as the control wheel in the cockpit is rotated, and deflecting simultaneously up or down to augment pitch control when the control column is pushed or pulled. Pitch control is also effected by the elevator mounted on the trailing edge of the canard. The elevator and the elevons move in opposite directions since the elevator is forward of the CG and the elevons are aft of the CG.

The small surface extending downward from the tip of tailcone originally was the yaw damper. At first it had a small movable rudder on the aft edge. It wasn't very effective as a yaw damper so it was strengthened and serves only as a tail skid. It probably does, however, provide a modicum of directional stability.

The Starship has a large whetted area and suffers from comparatively high skin friction drag as a result, even though the exterior surface generally is quite smooth because of the composite construction. The one area that contributed most to the high drag was the de-ice boots. The placement of the boots on the leading edges along with the poor installation on the early airplanes probably produced as much as fifteen to twenty percent of the total drag in the opinion of some flight test people. The combination of this high skin friction drag and the lack of any meaningful area ruling makes it have a very high drag rise as speed increases.

The director of engineering at the time I was at Beech working in the Starship program, told me on more than one occasion that he was of the opinion that the air between the nacelles and side of the fuselage was going supersonic at the higher speeds and contributing greatly to the drag rise. I don't know if this is true but I do know that the Starship produced the characteristic Mach rumble that you hear in a lot of jet airplanes at critical Mach.

I will never forget the first time I flew the Starship. An engineering test pilot friend of mine gave me this ride. Upon returning to Beech Field he had arranged a small ceremony where he and a couple of other test pilots presented me with a three inch button that said, "I just flew the Starship, please speak up."

The noise in this airplane was absolutely deafening and the first production airplane wasn't any better! The Starship has a noise profile opposite of conventionally configured airplanes. Since the engines and propellers are aft, all of the noise and vibration is in the cabin with the passengers. The further back you go the worse it is. Up front in the cockpit the noise levels were much lower. The noise in the cabin wasn't toned down to an acceptable level until serial number 21 (the first Model 2000A) when the airplane went from an eight place cabin to six place. The lower noise levels, however, required the addition of enough lead vinyl sound deading material in the aft cabin to more than make up for the weight savings achieved by the removal of two seats.

The flight characteristics of the Starship were the worst of any airplane I have ever operated. The reason: The airplane was too stable. Remember, in general when you increase stability you decrease controllability. The longitudinal (pitch) stability of the Starship had an extremely short period oscillation during recovery. The directional stability (yaw) was dead beat; deflect the rudders and release and the nose snaps back to where it came from with no perceptable oscillation. The lateral stability (roll) was neutral except at very small angles of bank. As I've told people many times when asked how the Starship flew, "It flew nice, but handled about like a '46 Dodge pick-up truck."

There is only one word that can describe the ground handling of the Starship, atrocious. To make a one-eighty on the runway after landing took two people on the rudder pedals. I can't imagine a small 120 pound male pilot or a woman being able to accomplish this maneuver without help. (Come to think about it, I never saw a woman fly a Starship.) When we demonstrated the airplane and a one-eighty on the runway was required we would get on the rudder pedal just as the pilot was about to straighten the airplane out to go in the opposite direction, and if we timed it just right he would never know just how much force this took. The Starship needed a nose wheel steering system in the worst way but then, "...that costs money."

In the mid nineteen sixties Boeing developed the 727, one of the best airliners ever built. It cost $150 million to bring into service with the worlds airlines. It carried 150 passengers. The first version sold for $5 million.

A mere twenty years later Beech/Raytheon spent between 350 and $750 million to develop the Starship, and, at one point they were going to raise the selling price to $4.9 million. What's wrong with this picture? The answer is the management of the Starship program from start to finish. It's almost as if management completely forgot everything they ever knew about building airplanes, as well as about the people who own and fly them, learned during the many years building Bonanza's, Baron's, and King-Air's. The feeling seems to have been, if we throw enough money at it it will be successful. They failed to recognize that Starship represented, for them, a complete lack of insight into the airplane market as it existed at the time.

"HOW? WHY? How could so bad a thing happen to such good, smart, well intentioned people? Herewith the highlights: Beech wasn't content to make the Starship somewhat innovative. It had to be innovative stem to stern. Composite wings? It had composite bolts." wrote Alan Farnham in FORTUNE magazine in May of 1994

An inattentative management team produced and airplane that wasn't any good. It was poorly designed on just about every front. They should have seen early on, say about 1992, that a big mistake had been made. If they would have been anywhere near as smart as they thought they were they would have, as Alan Farnham wrote in his article, "...cut Beech's losses by killing Starship outright." This is what Beech's dealers begged them to do, along with many others.

If you would like to read Alan Farnham's article, "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a flop!" Click Here. It's in PDF format so you will need an Adobe Reader. Here.

Here's part of an article posted on AvWeb on Sept 26, 2014 by Rick Durdan entitled "The-Less-Than-Great-Planes"

Beech stepped into the cutting edge of corporate aircraft design in the early 1980s, opting to produce a pusher , canard, composite turboprop. Engineers even sought assistance from the Rutan brothers outfit, Scaled Composites, a group with a heavyweight reputation for innovation . They built an 85% scale proof of concept airplane which, lazte in 1983 could beseen zooming around the skies of Wichita.While the Rutans were, and are, past masters of creating specific, on-purpose designs for such a singular task as a nonstop, unrefueled circumnavigation of the globe or a quick scoot out of the atmosphere, they wern't quite as adept when it came to designing an airplane that required the, but inevitacle compromises involved im meeting the demands of a day-to-day, general purpose transport. Unfortunately, the proof of concept vehicle was so cool-looking that no one figured out it had flawsthat would doom the ful scale airplane to mediocrity.

(Steve Berry comment: Scaled Composites built an 85% scale model of the Starship and earlier built a 62% model of the T-46 for Fairchild. Both were complete disasters simply because Scaled apparently did not know the first thing about extrapolating the aerodynamic data form these smaller models to the full size airplanes. I had engineers at Beech tell me that the data extrapolated for the Starshp was all but useless. It was reported that the drag of the full size T-46, of which only three were built, was some 30% higher than forcast.)

The complicated, drag generating, flap actuation mechanism was in the breeze rather than in the wing due to a desire to maximize space for fuel. Too late, someone figured out that - with aft-located swept wing - center of gravity considerations would preclude in the back of the wing and the actuators could have ben tucked inside, where they wouldn't have eaten into speed and efficiency. (Steve Berry comment: Actually, this is two separate issues: The flap actuators were large and did stick out "...in the breeze ..." as you have said. However they could have been covered with well designed fairings that would have probably helped decrease drag because of the area rule effect. (Like the addition of the drag bodies did when added to the trailing edge if the wing on the Convair 990.) At the very least even if it did nothing to decrease drag, it would have looked better. As it was it looked like something sombody built in their garage. Secondly, the fuel in the wing issue. The majority of the fuel in the Starship was carried in the strake tank which was basically centered on the airplanes nominal CG. The designers then added an 85 gallon (569 pounds) tank in the wings aft of each strake tank. The problem was that the fuel system was scheduled to use fuel from the aft tank first. Since this tank is also aft of the CG, as fuel was used from the aft tank, the CG moved forward, and in some loadings of the airplane the CG would move out of the envelope during cruise! The only way to keep this from happening was to severely limit the amount fuel carried in some loading conditions.)

No one had ever certified a composite airframe, so being the first, Beech had to spend staggering sums educating a reluctant, hide bound FAA bureaucracy about composites and their inherent strength. As each FAA employee was fearful of a career ending mistake and few had the background to fully understand composites, the result was a series of decisions that unnecessarily added hundreds of pounds to the airframe, further reducing performance. (Steve Berry comment: I'm not sure just how much the conservatism of the FAA and it's certification process contributed to the final outcome of the Starship fiasco. Beech blames the FAA; the FAA excepts no responsibility by their silence. However, make no mistake, Beech knew little or nothing about composite construction at the start. They had to depend entirely on Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites. Now, Burt Rutan is a genius when it come to aerodynamics but to this day knows nothing about building certifiable airplanes. That's just a fact. The sad thing is that the Starship ended up about 1000-1200 pounds heavier that it should have weighed, and that's the bottom line.) Beech eventually got a huge return in corporate knowledge when it started building jets; but in the short run the costs involved with the Starship cetification ment that it would be priced more than a million dollars higher than it's nearest competitor, one of the Piper Cheyenne series, which carried the same load, faster. (Steve Berry comment: When we were out on the road trying to sell the Starship we were indoctrinated to sell it on the fact that it was built of composites. Well the fact was that nobody cared. One prospect told us, "I don't care if its made out of paper mache." At the time, not only the coming Piper Cheyenne 400LS but also Beech's own model 350, was the competition. In essence we were competing with ourselves, and the 350 was as fast, or faster, than the early Starships.)To add more worries, Beech had to contend with the challenge faced ever since the first Zeppelin flew: dealing with the noise of engine exhaust through the pusher propeller. With the Starship, it seemed somehow magnified with the airframe, engine and prop marriage, and Beech wrestled valiently with meeting flyover noise requirements initially only being able to meet them at 85-percent power.(Steve Berry comment: I don't remember that flyover noise was ever considered an issue by Beech during the Starship program. (Beech could never meet flyover noise requirements with the Beechjet either.) A much bigger, and major problem, for the Starship was the interior noise levels. Inherient in the design of a pusher configuration is that the engines are back where the passengers are. The first production Starship was still so noisy that it was painful to ride in. (I know that's hard to believe but true.) I can remember the first time I flew a Starship with one of the test pilots. After the flight a few other test pilots showed up to present me with a button that said, "I just flew a Starship, please speak up!" I think that the concept of a quiet airplane up to the time of the Starship at least, was foreign to Beech. Well, the problem just snowballed. They had to put so much lead-vinyl in the back of the airplane to quiet it down that at serial number 21 they removed two seats to make up for the extra weight, which made the original eight-place airplane a six-place airplane and that didn't go over well with future sales prospects.)Marketed in 1989, when the aviation economy wasn't particularly robust, and priced about the same as a Cessna Citation and Lear 31, both were far faster, sales were anemic. To make matters worse it turned out that corporate executives, for all their claims to love inovation, were conservative to the point of being reactionary and the Starship's futuristic appearance worked against it when it came time for a company to decide on a purchase. Beech built 53 Starships. To the surprise of the world, it eventually offered to buy them all back. All but a few rugged individualists took them up on the offer. For me , living in Wichita at the time and enthusiastically watching the high tech prototypesfly over my house, it was uncomfortable the story play itself out. I admit a certain bias in favor of American airplanes (I did, after all, spend seven years working for an American airplane manufacturer), so it was especially painful to see a non-American company get the turboprop pusher formula right. The fast attractive Piaggio Avanti is selling well throughout the world. Beech didn't so much get it wrong with the Starship; they just didn't quite get it right, and the not-getting-it-right certainly wasn't all their fault. Forty years earlier, Beech was the one who got it right with the Bananza, wiping out the market for the Navion, which had appeared a year earlier. That caused North American Aviation to leave the GA market. This time Beech was on the losing end of the equation, but resolutely took its lumps and used what it had leadned to put together the very successful Premier line of jets. From lemons are made lemonade.

And this is where all but a few ended up - in the boneyard. What a waste!