Quote Originally Posted by Duke_of_URL View Post
The Beech Starship is the loudest private aircraft I've ever heard. One would fly over my house in Wichita, KS and I called it the flying lawnmower for its sickening howl. It was a composite dog, a first of sorts, but way too heavy and Beech bought them all back, except for one, and that owner vowed to never sell it back. For a long time the Starship (aka "Scarship") production line was all represented along the runway from whence they were birthed waiting to be scrapped.

Piaggio actually learned a lot from the Beech Starship mistakes, and it turned into a pretty successful private aircraft.

The prototype Beech made was a 3/5 version. This flew well, and was a nice scaled up version of his Long-EZ. When they made the full size airframe, many issues came up.
Beech did not want to do the iterative design needed to remove the excess composite weight, as Ratheon was only interested in certification.
The one good thing they were left with was the many autoclave ovens. They had to build 50 to get the Wichita tax abatement for building the new building for manufacture.
This is my memory of this. I worked on the autopilot that Collins Radio was contracted to produce along with all the displays. There were 17 or 19 CRTs, most of them color except a backup CDI in green phosphor. It was a major design effort by Collins to integrate many systems to reduce volume and weight. The displays all had integrated symbol generators, as previous version had that in a remote box, with RGB cabling up to the cockpit.

I recall several issues with the Starship besides being heavy and a fuel burner, you had to duck you head down walking down the main isle. And it was noisy inside the fuselage as well, as those pusher props resonated the airframe.
This airframe being 'plastic' cause new regulations for lighting and RF radio susceptibility requirements. That ended up keeping me employed for 29 years as I became an expert in protection circuit design for HIRF and lightning requirements.