Category: Flying

Beech Starship

A while ago I wrote about the sad demise of the Beech Starship. Raytheon decided that it was too expensive to support them, so gave all the existing owners a King Air in trade, and parked them in the desert, probably never to fly again.

But this week’s AvWeb NewsWire has a short article about how some people are keeping their Starships alive. One of the people using his Starship works for Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, and uses it as a chase plane there. Since Burt Rutan built the prototype Starship, I suppose he’s got the best chance of anybody of keeping it running.

Weird Call

Ok, my cell phone sucks. And it got worse when I ill-advisedly bought a fancy painted cover for it, which involved taking the guts out of the existing cover and putting them in the new one.

So getting little drop-outs during calls is nothing new. Unfortunately during the call I got a few seconds ago, from a cell phone in Maryland, it happened just when the caller said who it was. The voice was a little familiar, and when he asked if I’ve been flying recently I guessed he’s probably from the Piper mailing list. But since he’d called to ask about his problems with Windows 98, I couldn’t really help. I don’t know that much about Windows, and I’d sort of like to keep it that way.