Beechcraft

Beechcraft has been making aeroplanes at Wichita, Kansas since 1932, and the King Air line the company is known for first flew there in January 1964.

Walter and Olive Ann Beech set up the Beech Aircraft Company at Wichita, Kansas in 1932, with Ted Wells as chief engineer, in a Cessna plant that had gone quiet. The Staggerwing flew the same year. Ownership moved to Raytheon in 1980, the jet side was merged with Hawker in 1994, and the marque has sat inside Textron Aviation, beside Cessna, since 2014. What survived those changes of owner is the aeroplane the company is identified with: the King Air first flew in January 1964 and the line has run since.

The Beechcraft entry here is small and split cleanly in two: one turboprop and one light jet, the King Air 260 and the Premier IA. They sit in different categories and answer different sectors, 310 knots against 451, and reading them as a graded range would be a mistake. They are two separate propositions from a company that has spent ninety years building unglamorous aeroplanes people keep flying. The question in front of a reader is not which Beechcraft to take but whether the sector wants a turboprop or a jet.