Beechcraft Baron shows best of old and new

June 16, 2014 5:40 pm

By Rohit Jaggi

Rohit Jaggi test drives a Barron Aircraft for FT Wealth.

Taking off from the long runway of North Weald airfield in southeast England, I catch a glimpse of a tarnished old aircraft languishing on the grass. The 1940s Twin Beech is from much earlier days of aviation, yet it is actually not that distant a relative of the aircraft I am flying.

It stands as a reminder of how much technological progress has been made in aviation. And how little.

Electric aircraft, as discussed in my last column, promise to be the shape of the future. That future may be approaching, but for now it remains tantalizingly over the horizon. And while the infrastructure is not yet in place for electric flying vehicles, the fueling and servicing infrastructure is more than adequate to cater for the fleet currently flying with internal combustion engines.

Servicing the lower end of aviation, in altitude as much as price, are the piston-engined aircraft that can provide transport with an ease that the combination of electric motors and batteries will not be able to usurp for some time.

Aircraft, such as the six-seat, twin-engine Beechcraft Baron G58 I am flying, are part of a small coterie of machines that have enough capability to be usable as business tools for short hops. The Baron has two engines for safety but is without the higher cost and fuel burn of turbines driving its propellers.

This sleek aircraft is a direct descendant of a design that first took to the air more than 50 years ago. But while the Baron’s basic architecture remains – broadly – the same, it has changed significantly in many areas.

As has the company that makes it. Beechcraft, its headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, dates back to 1932, almost as early in the age of aviation as its one-time rival maker of light aircraft Cessna, which is also based in Wichita.

But over the course of its history, Beechcraft was purchased by Raytheon, bought out, nearly sold to China and, just a few months ago, taken under Cessna-owning Textron’s wing to become part of the new Textron Aviation.

For the Baron, the inside of the cockpit shows off perhaps the most radical change made during its life span. A pair of large display screens takes the place of all individual instruments, gauges and radios that used to be in front of the pilot. They bring the half-century-old airframe bang up to date, giving the sort of control and navigation assistance that pilots at the front end of today’s generation of business jets enjoy.

Such avionics are also easily updated, as new or improved autopilots and navigation equipment come on to the market, making current versions more future-friendly. But the Baron already has enough gadgets, gizmos and safety aids to operate in all-weather conditions and thus to ensure that a trip can be completed as planned most of the time.

The sophistication of the instrumentation makes a flight to north Wales, for example, simple, as does the capability of the autopilot and the benign handling characteristics of the aircraft. It is fast, too, capable of more than 200 knots (kts), or 230 statute (ordinary) miles per hour.

And it has a huge range of up to roughly 1,500 nautical miles – about 1,700 ordinary miles. But, as with most things flying, one has to choose between payload, range and speed. Full fuel tanks mean the plane cannot take six people, and flying at 200kts would eat into the range.

The trip to Wales, while just a short hop for the Baron, highlights the utility of a piston twin – the cross-country journey takes about a third of the time that could be achieved using ground transport. The Baron also needs little in the way of runway space for landing or taking off so, even though my destination has a long, hard-surface runway, plenty of short grass strips could be used, enlarging the options for landing close to your final destination.

Beechcraft delivered 35 of the $1.4m Barons in 2013 – not a huge number but large in the context of the 933 piston-engined aircraft deliveries that were made worldwide last year.

But military and government needs for observation platforms have driven a diversification into a surveillance version – something the company knows a great deal about through its experience of converting its bigger, turboprop King Air planes for such missions.

There are few direct rivals for the accomplished Baron – the Seneca V from Florida-based Piper is the closest. Another six-seater, whose history is only a decade shorter than the Baron’s, it also has engines that burn aviation gasoline. That is one of the looming problems for this type of aircraft, however. AVgas is expensive, and not available everywhere. Diamond of Austria makes the Twin Star, which has two diesel piston engines that burn the more widely available and much cheaper jet fuel, but it only has four seats.

Piper and Beechcraft’s stablemate Cessna are putting diesel engines into smaller aircraft. They could be a part of the formula that can draw much-required new blood and a fresh buzz into the lighter end of private aviation – which the industry needs if it is to generate both pilots and passengers for the heavy end. At least until electric aircraft become reality and appear this side of the horizon.

Source:  http://www.ft.com