End of the Starship

Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis

Shadow Administrator
Staff member
I read in the latest Aviation Leak that Raytheon is going to be taking all Starships and transporting them to Marana Air Park to be chopped up and incinerated (apparently, Marana has the only facility that can incinerate the carbon-fibers used in the aircraft). One has to wonder why Marana has such an powerful incinerator...

In related news, here is a list of all the aircraft in storage out at Marana.

It will be sad to see all the Starships gone, and hopefully some of the 10 private owners of the remarkable aircraft will keep them instead of accepting Raytheon's offer of trading a newer aircraft for them. It seems that it is too expensive to upkeep, and since there are only 60 of them in existence, Raytheon wants to end all support of this aircraft.
 
Marana still has shadey stuff going on over there. When Intermountain Aviation left in 1976 and was replaced by Evergreen, one CIA operation was simply switched with another.
 
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What's a Starship?

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Starship%20Sunset%20off%20SFO.jpg


Was designed by Burt Rutan, the same guy that did Voyager (first plane to fly round the world non-stop).
 
I personally like the starship a lot. Sharp looking plane, but I've heard it to be an MX nightmare.
 
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but I've heard it to be an MX nightmare

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Yeah, I've heard the same. Also, I believe its the Starship (as opposed to the Piaggio Avanti) that has a history of having prop-problems due little pebbles and stuff being kicked up by the landing gear and going into the prop.

Cool looking airplane though, I got the chance to sit in one at Oshkosh a few years ago.
 
[ QUOTE ]
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but I've heard it to be an MX nightmare

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Yeah, I've heard the same. Also, I believe its the Starship (as opposed to the Piaggio Avanti) that has a history of having prop-problems due little pebbles and stuff being kicked up by the landing gear and going into the prop.

Cool looking airplane though, I got the chance to sit in one at Oshkosh a few years ago.

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Are the props composite? We had composite props on our Cessna Caravans at Skywest/Scenic and management didn't like us using beta mode or reverse for that reason, especially at some of the fields we flew into.

Used to see Starships all the time at Corporate Jets in SDL when I worked line there.
 
It's too bad; it's a great looking plane, and also I believe the wing design is supposed to (correct me if I'm wrong) eliminate stalls, or make it harder to stall. Also the rear-mounted engines make the cabin quieter, but of course everything that gets kicked up by the main gear hits the props.

What part of maintenance is costly; is it prop damage or is it a lot of things that add up? Also, couldn't they put stone deflectors on the wheels to help minimize that type of damage? I know on photos of MD-80s I've seen, there are stone deflectors on the nose gear...
 
Yeah the cannard stalls first, the nose drops, and the main keeps flying the whole way. So supposedly if you hold the elevator back you'll do a series of porpoising cannard stalls and just keep on flyin'.

Anyways just what I've heard
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