Beech X700: The Starship that could have been

The X700 mockup looks sleek compared to the King Airs which evolved from the Queen Air, which was itself an evolution of the Twin Bonanza.

I heard from John Pike after he read my observation here that the Starship was a huge disaster for Beech, and for all of general aviation in terms of an enormous missed opportunity. John read with special interest because he was VP of research and development at Beech during the period the Starship was hatched.

Beech, as every successful company does, had ongoing efforts to design improved and replacement airplanes for the company line. In the late 1970s John had his preliminary design group perform configuration studies on airplanes that could supersede Beech’s King Air 90 and 200 stalwart turboprops.

The X700 mockup represents the King Air 90 size replacement with enough cabin length for a club four passenger seat configuration. Note the enormous cabin windows.

One of the seven configurations considered was a pusher canard turboprop built using composite material. This was long before the name Starship was ever imagined at Beech. And, because of huge risks in the canard pusher configuration meeting performance projections, and FAA certification complications of a composite airplane, John ranked this design last in the lineup of seven as most likely to succeed.

The X700 cockpit mockup still has plenty of analog gauges but does imagine what was to come in terms of the electronic flight instruments.

John named what he thought was the best idea to come out of the preliminary design group the X700. It was a conventional turboprop in terms of configuration with engines on the wings and a T-tail. Unlike the King Airs with their “vertical oval” shape fuselage, the X700 cabin was round, a more efficient design for containing cabin pressurization. A full scale mockup of the smallest King Air 90 replacement of the X700 was built.

The X700 cockpit featured electronic flight instruments, something quite advanced for the 1970s. The team also planned to use extensive metal bonding to manufacture smooth airfoils for the wings and tail, something Cessna was doing with the its piston twin 414A, 421C and 441 turobprop on the other side of town.

To me the most striking figure of the X700 was its enormous cabin windows. The cockpit transparencies—as we cognoscenti now call windows—are also huge, but that’s less remarkable. The reason I’m so enamored with large cabin windows is the success of Gulfstream. That company has gotten most things right since the first G-1 in 1958, and huge oval cabin windows were there from the start. What did Gulfstream do with its all-new G650, G500 and G600 designs? Make the windows even bigger. Passengers, who are the real customers, just love them.

The preliminary design group imagined growing the X700 design into a straight wing jet, and with more modification, possibly into a faster swept wing airplane.

John told me the mockup of the X700 was destroyed and never saw the light of day. Other preliminary design and engineering work on the model was tossed out and the new ownership and management pressed ahead with a decision to build what became the Starship.

Every manufacturing company, whether it builds boats, autos or airplanes, has libraries full of preliminary designs that didn’t advance to production. I’m sure Ford had alternative designs for the Edsel on the shelf.

Looking back is always error free, but it’s still interesting to see what kind of Beech airplanes we could be flying today if different decisions had been made those 40 years ago. Thanks for filling us in, John.

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Mac McClellan

When people ask Mac McClellan what he does for a living, he replies, “I fly airplanes and write about them. And I’m one of the most fortunate people in the world to have been able to make a career of doing what I love.” Mac has been a pilot for more than 45 years, an aviation writer for more than 40 and has been lucky enough to get to fly just about every type of personal and business airplane in production from the 1970s onward. He was on the Flying Magazine staff for 35 years and editor-in-chief for 20 of those years. He has private pilot privileges in single-engine airplanes, commercial pilot in helicopters and ATP in airplanes with more than one engine. He holds several business jet type ratings and has logged more than 10,000 hours. His first airplane was a Cessna 140 and for the past 27 years he has owned a Baron 58 flying it more than 5,000 hours to cover the aviation industry. And now he is a part-time corporate pilot flying a King Air 350.

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