Originally posted by thebozeian
reply to post by granpabobby
Sorry granpa you are wrong, or at least out of date.
The Beech Starship is no longer in production and hasn't been for quite some years. Whats more Beech basically bought back all the airframes they
could and destroyed them. They gave trade-ins to then owners and took back all they could as they no longer wanted to support them given that the
program was something of a commercial flop. To the best of my knowledge there are only around 5-9 airframes either airworthy or retain registration.
Beech sold all it's parts inventory to a Starship owner and only offer phone support. All bar one of those remaining are in the US with the other in
Queensland Australia.
LEE.
Just a note, but the private story of the Beech Starship is very interesting, and quite telling...
Basically, when they sold them, they offered an "all in one, complete maintenance package" inclusive in the purchase cost - its not know how the
sales team got the authorisation to sell such a package, but essentially it ruined the profit potential of the aircraft sold, and as Beech had another
50 sales in progress with similar terms, they worked out that the cost of providing maintenance would have cost them the equivalent of building all
owners a brand new aircraft every 5 years.
So they scrapped the program, bought back all aircraft already delivered that they could get their owners to part with (because it was cheaper than
providing the maintenance) and scrapped them.
Quite a costly mistake.
x-29 
