Is’nt that a bit harsh?
Both aircraft are on the wishlists here for a while and both are great unique designs, a little comparable, a little different.
I will enjoy both of them.
Wow, I am so jealous you’ve seen one IRL. I haven’t seen one, but being obsessed with the Starship since childhood (due to MSFS), I have dissected every single image, video and data on the aircraft and I haven’t noticed the disproportionality you mention. To me it’s a stunning looking aircraft and one that broke a lot of technological barriers for its time (hence why the myth, significance and aura around it). I am totally with you, the Piaggio got the numbers but not the legacy.
You’re right, I was a bit harsh. Sorry!
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Btw, is Black Square = Just Flight?
Because if it is, that will suck. They are far from being a serious third party aircraft developer. They have lost their edge decades ago.
Just Flight is the publisher for Black Square. The Starship is sure to be high quality coming from them.
We are getting the Avanti as well from FlightFX. Looking forward to both!
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If you were talking about Aeroplane Heaven or Aerosoft I would agree.
But all the Just Flight PA28s, the BAe 146 and the Hawk are all superb. So I really don’t know where that statement came from.
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Don’t get me wrong, I want whatever it came with, I’m just curious what those early capabilities were.
This IMO is the most beautiful aircraft ever. I can’t wait to do a trip around the world in it, VFR if I have to. 
Holy moly, I be like a kid in a candy shop.
Way ahead of it’s time probably one of the nicest designs I had ever seen.
and need powerful (and LOUD) cooling fans when the displays are on
Just open the window…
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Looking at the timeline of the Starship and P.180 first flights and introductions, how is it that the Piaggio seems more modern (avionics anyway) and has so much better performance? They first flew around the same time.
The EVO is the 400 KTAS airplane that most people think of when you say Piago P.180 Avanti.
So was the original P.180 actually similar performance to the Starship?
By the time the Avanti II came out, they had over 20 years’ worth of improvement in powerplants and avionics
How did Piaggio get so much funding to continue all this development and certification all this time (without many sales to back it up), while Beechcraft/Raytheon just sit there and freeze the design?
Because in European countries the government will often jump in on projects they deem nationality ‘prestigious’.
The starship had a lot of things about that were being pushed through regardless of sensibility, like developing your own avionics systems ‘just because’. Scaled composites often shows that attitude too. A lot of their aircraft were built with ‘development monies’ for larger projects rather than being bound to straight up business sense. They could of just dropped a proline suite into it, and they ended up with CRT ‘digital’ which ends up more like a movie prop from a very dated 80’s film. Trying to play Apples proprietary game and ending up like betamax.
And the 350 IS shameful, we Xbox folk need the mods!
An article I found on another related thread in here, beautifully explaining the backstory and drama that unraveled and “forced” the Starship into its demise. It’s extremely sad reading it to realise, for one more time, that right timing and circumstances in any project play a SIGNIFICANT role into its success, or failure.
I do strongly believe if the cards were played right (FAA being open mind, Raytheon executives believing the engineers and awarding trust and respectful project timelines, not stalling progress and wasting time, right marketing decisions taken, etc) could have made the Starship a remarkable aircraft beyond any expectation. And could probably have seen an update later on with more advanced avionics, better engines, extended range, stretched cabin, interior options etc.
Anyway it is what it is. Not the first or the last example of such a case in the aerospace sector.
Either way a joyful and educational read for sure, enjoy…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/beached-starship-5429731/
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Here’s the rabbit hole on this. Look at the wing surface areas for nearly identical capability as far as cabins go. They had to keep moving the wing back and making it larger, which of course added more and more drag by order of magnitude. The FAA required the wing to be strengthened as well before certification, ‘just because’ at the time, and the weight went up, again requiring more wing area. Which also moved it up a class, requiring nearly double the certification time. Really, it began essentially with ‘hey the long E-Z is pretty cool, lets make a bigger one’, and nobody ever said WAIT A MINUTE, maybe look at this again from a different perspective?
I feel bad for developers here trying to replicate the one-off avionics. PERSONALLY, I wouldn’t mind a legacy version over time, with upgraded CF propellers and G1000 or G3000 avionics, as this is how they would be today if still in common use. I doubt the CRT instruments would still be in one, unless there was only one.
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like developing your own avionics systems ‘just because’
I feel bad for developers here trying to replicate the one-off avionics
Why do you call them “one-off”? Isn’t Starship equipped with Collins Pro Line 4, which was used on several planes, including even the Avanti?
“Piaggio Avanti P180 aircraft equipped with Rockwell Collins’ Pro Line 4 avionics can now be upgraded to Pro Line 21”
The wing area and type is one of the many factors in an aircraft’s overhaul performance and although quite critical that’s not where the Starship loses its edge over the Piaggio. Weight is the losing battle for almost 90% of the aircraft making it out of development and production line as prototypes. If you lose the “weight-fight”, you’ve lost your product’s market value because weight factors in almost every significant category- speed, rate of climb, range, payload, fuel consumption, fuel storage, take off run - thus airport op capability etc. The proof of concept performed exceptionally well to the point that everybody went ecstatic about what’s to come (with inferior engines too). The power to weight ratio was incredible for an aircraft in its category. Then the management stepped in and forced a very aggressive and unrealistic timeline for a first production aircraft (despite the opposition of the engineering team). On top you had an FAA which was trying to figure out how to certify an airframe totally different from what they were used till that day. The result was 2,400 lbs worth of extra mods bringing it to 14,900 lbs of total gross weight (target was 12,500 lbs, close to P.180). Add 2,400 lbs to the Piaggio and see how all those performance numbers change. To show you how incompetent and rushing the management was, instead of waiting for POC (proof of concept) performance results (and hence changes), they started building tooling for the production model six days after Rutan signed up the POC contract.
Obviously I am not here to say that the Piaggio is an inferior design, of course not. The numbers on the table speak for themselves. But given freedom of development for the engineers, more open minded management and aviation authority plus a more realistic timeline and rest assure the Starship design would have easily been an incredible aircraft with eye watering performance characteristics for its class.
Unfortunately it didn’t have the backing and time development of the Piaggio which continue to develops for years and years even after Lear run out of cash (thanks to Ferrari who stepped in and backed the project for a decade plus).
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The Piaggio wouldn’t ever need to carry around 2400 of absolute dead worthless weight. And again, back to the scaled composites problem of “just because”. And with the nonsensical avionics package, it reminds me of this
Scaled Composites were not the only ones developing the Starship. Some of the finest aerospace engineers teamed up for the project, Rutan was only one of the voices in the development phase and certainly not the deciding one. You had engineers that worked on Concorde, NASA (Apollo program) and Boeing and some of the leading aerodynamicists for the time. So to claim that whey were “out of their depth” on what they were proposing and backing up as a design is laughable at best. The battle was certainly NOT lost at the design.
Anyway, we’re deviating from the topic. I hope to see this aircraft being represented here in one way or another. Of course the Piaggio is another aircraft that certainly needs a serious representation.
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Pretty sure it was always faster but until they finally got to the Mk II where it really found it’s pace, but still slow in sales. You could say the EVO was where it FINALLY reached it’s ‘dream concept’ potential, but took 30 years to get there. Dash speed is way higher than typical cruise, so it has some numbers that are essentially just numbers, firewall speed where jets are perfectly happy at economy cruise. If the Starship had another 20 years of development life in it, and maybe some subsidization, and a few government orders too(and there were more than a few POC government projects for the Avanti, which are gifts to keeping something in play)… The Avanti story translated to the Starship would be something like Tesla jumping in and buying the program and just kept ‘making them’. Then having the US government jump in occasionally and asking for a Starship drone POC and throwing a few hundred million at them.
The Avanti jumped the shark in tech over the Starship going the minimized wing/lifting body design that helped it creep along until it finally made business sense, most of the engineering was of American origin, like the wing. Although lower cost Jets are now right THERE for the choosing as well, where jet aircraft are in a sort of renaissance. I think going forward it’s still going to be hard for the Avanti to win over businesses over either the plethora of new choices in jets at around the same price, or a little more prestige moving up where they’re embarrassingly faster, or a stalwart versatile reliable TP like a PC or King Air. With a lot of tech companies downsizing and remote work there’s going to be a pretty decent supply of low time business aircraft as well out there. The only real business case for an Avanti EVO would be for someone who simply wants only an Avanti EVO. It’s kind of alone in a ‘cool plane bro’ class, the one Fisker in the Tesla lot.
Stop trying to ruin this plane for me.
Unsubscribed.
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