Historical Pilot - Beech X700
THE X700 MOCK-UP LOOKS SLEEK COMPARED WITH THE KING AIR WHICH EVOLVED FROM THE QUEEN AIR, WHICH WAS ITSELF AN EVOLUTION OF THE TWIN BONANZA.
Iheard from John Pike after he read my observation here that the Starship was a huge disaster for Beech, as well as for all General Aviation in terms of an enormous missed opportunity. John read with special interest because he was Vice President of research and development at Beechcraft 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.
Beech X700 interior
The X700 mock-up 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. Due to the 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.
Beech X700 cockpit
The X700 cockpit mock-up still has plenty of analogue 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 Air with its ‘vertical oval’ shape fuselage, the X700 cabin was round, a more efficient design for containing cabin pressurization. A full-scale mock-up 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 its piston twin 414A, 421C and 441 turboprops 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 is less remarkable. The reason I am so enamoured with large cabin windows is the success of Gulfstream. That company has got almost everything 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.
Beech formation mock-up
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 mock-up of the X700 was destroyed and never saw the light of day. Other preliminary design and engineering work on the model were 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, automobiles or airplanes, has libraries full of preliminary designs that did not advance to production. I am sure Ford had alternative designs for the Edsel on the shelf.
Looking back is always error free, but it is still interesting to see what kind of Beech airplanes we could be flying today if different decisions had been made those 40 years ago.