Hello, I am a happy owner of Blacksquare Turbine Duke and Bonanza Professional. Currently I’m considering expanding my BS fleet, but I am not sure which one should I choose.
I really appreciate practising different IFR approaches, so I initially thought about the Baron. However, its cockpit is practically identical as in Bonanza and I’m looking for something new.
Hence, I thought about the Starship, but it seems to be very complex. Or is it difficult to learn? Also, I usually fly shorter flights (max 30 minutes in air), so it seems that the Starship might not be the best aircraft for that.
I hope that someone would help me with sorting out this dilemma . Thanks
It’s much easier to learn than it seems. The biggest hurdle is the FMS, but even that one is surprisingly easy to learn. If you really like to get something different, the Starship is definitely the way to go over the Baron, especially since you already have the Duke and the Bonanza.
I always do short 30-60 minute hops with the Starship. It’s great for that, because you can cover a lot of distance in a short time (it cruises over 300 knots!).
There are some good YouTube tutorials to get you started in no time:
Here is a playlist of overview videos directly made by Backsquare. I can’t seem to link to it directly, but it’s here close to the top (“Starship MSFS | Black Square”)
The Starship is not difficult to learn, but it is very different than other planes, so if you switch up planes a lot, it’s a bit of mental gear clashing to relearn some of the finer points.
The BKSQ TBM850 and the Caravan are also good options that are quite different than the Beeches.
I have all of the BKSQ planes, so you really can’t go wrong with any of them.
I’ve been rotating between the Turbo Duke and Starship lately, they’re both brilliant.
As @Jigsaw407 said, if you can figure out your way around the avionics, you’ll be fine in the Starship. If you want something a little more traditional in airframe and avionics, the Duke package is just as nice. I love them both.
Starship was Nick’s passion project. It can be a little intimidating but likes others have said, it’s quite easy to learn and I really enjoy the workflow. I own and enjoy all of Black Square’s planes and the Starship is my favorite. It’s awesome in VR and looks fantastic while night flying. If I could only keep one plane in my hangar, it would be the Starship. It’s great for flying GA VFR or for up high IFR.
The Starship is superb and I really recommend it over the Baron if the OP wants to perform longer IFR flights. Its only limitation is the landing speed, which if I remember correctly, must always be above 90 or 100 knots, else the nose will drop and the stall follows up next. This limits a bit the amount of airports/airfields you can land at, but it’s not that critical.
Of course the Baron is a really great addon too, but as stated by the OP, the overall experience is not going to be very different from the Bonanza. The C208 is cool as well but it’s slower.
For me takeoff is closer to 5000 assuming minimum obstacle clearance. It’s always exciting to operate it from small airports because it seems like it will never reach the speed in time
It uses all the runway we have paid for!
But I am flying longer ranges with a lot of fuel most of the time.
I’ve seen a real Starship at KASH before, the runway was 5000 ft at the time. It’s 6000 ft now. If I owned one, yeah, I’d stick to the more mainstream GA airports.
(KASH at one time was one of the busiest GA airports in the Northeast, if not the country, back when Daniel Webster College had their flight school there. Did my PP training there in the mid-90’s, it was nice to train out of a towered airport, and it was good that it was so busy, too. It especially helped me get my ATC terminology practiced. I think I was only asked to call the tower once, lol. (I forget why, but it wasn’t bad) Traumatic, tho, obviously )
. Thanks
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