Do you look at a Beech 18 and see the heritage in its lines? The model has become so iconic to the modern pilot’s eyes that we tend to look at its silhouette in the sky, and see a reference only to that classic twin.
But those radials thrusting skyward have an inheritance from the design that came before it—the Beech Model 17, known to most as the Staggerwing—in those very engines, and much of the technology used initially to turn the company’s flagship single into a multiengine work of art.
