(June 2011) We’d just landed, taxied in and shut down the one-of-a-kind King Air 250 on the Atlantic FBO ramp at my home airport of Austin Bergstrom. We’d made our fuel order, closed up the big airstair door and started into the FBO when my flying buddy, Hawker Beechcraft’s Mark Mohler, spotted a pretty King Air 200 on the ramp. Mark’s been flying these airplanes for a while and knows a thing or a thousand about them, so I asked just out of curiosity what vintage it was. With a new paint job, a pair of Raisbeck wing lockers and that same company’s dual ventral fin mod, the airplane looked nearly new.
“There’s one sure way to tell,” Mohler told me as he ambled over to the rear left side of the airplane, “the data plate.”
It was an early ’80s bird. A lot of these King Airs have 10,000-plus hours on them and they’re still going strong.
The reason they do and that Hawker Beechcraft Corp. (HBC) is still building them is that King Airs make sense for so many applications. They are used for hauling cargo to mountainous villages, for flying executives to board meetings at downtown airports, for evacuating injured off-roaders from outback gravel strips, for taking family and friends on mountain vacation getaways and much more. The hallmark of their versatility is that a single airplane, with a quick change of seats, can be and often is used for several different purposes.
The new King Air 250 aims to do all that and more while doing it better. It’s a tall order.
Legacy of Success
If it seems to you as though the Beechcraft King Air has been around forever, maybe that’s because, for most of us, it has been. Like so many other airplanes of its generation, the Beechcraft King Air wasn’t so much created as it evolved from lesser but closely related designs, and I say “lesser” advisedly. The nonpressurized (with one exception), piston-powered Twin Bonanza and Queen Air platforms, which were the basis for the King Air line, were solid airplanes for their time but have not stood the test of time. This is clearly because they suffered built-in limitations — no pressurization and no turbine power. The King is all about both of these things.
The model history of the King is complicated, and at times Beechcraft had half a dozen models — small and large, with and without T-tails, with special equipment and different engine configurations — all competing for various turboprop niches. For the past many years the lineup has been greatly simplified, with just three models; today they are the 350i, 250 and C90GTx.
It’s interesting to note that none of the King Air’s pressurized, turboprop cabin-class competitors — through much of the ’80s there were rivals from Cessna, Piper, Mitsubishi and Swearingen — are around anymore, while the King Air has doggedly maintained its popularity. Hawker Beechcraft, as the company is known today, has built more than 5,000 King Airs over the years, starting with the first King Air, a Model 90, way back in 1964. (So, yes, the 50th anniversary party is on short final.) And despite the discredited theory that turbofans would replace turboprops by now, the King Air motors on.
Simply Super
The King Air 250 is the latest model in the enormously popular King Air 200 series. Beechcraft introduced the first Super King Airs back in the early 1970s with the launch of the 200 and 300 models. The 300 featured a three-foot stretch and more powerful engines, while the 200 was a “sub-twelve-five” airplane, meaning one did not need a type rating to fly it. Indeed, the King Air 200 was the largest, most complex airplane a multiengine-rated pilot could theoretically simply hop in and fly. The 300-series airplanes required a type rating. The Model 350i continues in production.
The 200 series debuted in 1974 and has undergone nearly continuous improvements in that time. Before the soon-to-be-certified King Air 250, the most recent 200 was the 200 GTi, which featured more powerful engines and the Collins Pro Line 21 avionics suite. It was faster and more sophisticated than any King Air 200 before it.
The 200 is a big airplane, with a generous cabin and an eight- to nine-seat capacity. Its T-tail and big, round windows give it a serious ramp presence, and its big, beefy, double-tire main landing gear makes it look ready for business, which it most assuredly is.
The Pratt & Whitney engines on the 250 are the same hybrid version, the –52 model, that was on the 200GT. The –52 is essentially the gear box of the previous –42 engine mated to the power section of the engine that powers the larger King Air 350. While the Dash 52 is still limited to 850 shp, as in previous B200s, the engine has greater thermodynamic range, up to 1,050 shp, so it can propel that 850 shp to higher altitude than the Dash 42 can. It unfortunately goes without saying that the PT-6s are not fadec-controlled, so there’s a good deal of engine management to complicate the job of the single pilot.
Faster, Quieter, Stronger
Normally when you try to find out what makes a new model different, you start by looking at hardware changes and go from there. You could do that with the 250 as well, but I’d argue that it’s more instructive to start with performance figures and work your way back from there.
The figure that the manufacturer seems most impressed by is the reduction in fully loaded takeoff distance, from an absurdly low 2,579 feet to an even more absurdly low 2,111. In hot and high conditions, the 250 outperforms its predecessor, the 200GT, by an even greater margin. At a field elevation of 5,000 feet and a temperature of 25 C (77 degrees F), the 250 uses just 3,099 feet of runway, compared with 3,800 feet for the 200GT. The time to climb to 35,000 feet was cut from a respectable 27 minutes to just 23 minutes, and the max Mach operating speed was increased from .52 to .58. Moreover, the single-engine service ceiling (the altitude at which the airplane is not able to do much useful climbing) increased nearly 2,000 feet, from 24,200 to 26,000. All of these improvements have benefits. The faster climb saves fuel, the increased high-speed operation allows for faster descents, and the enhanced takeoff performance means operators can choose from more airports and operate with more payload on hotter days and from higher elevations.
Technology Prevails
Because the weight of the airplane is essentially fixed for all time at 12,500 pounds or less — its ramp weight is actually a bit higher than that — by FAA regulation, Hawker Beechcraft had to be smart about how it improved the performance of the model. As it turned out, “smart” looks a lot more like “brilliant” because the program heads were able to achieve remarkable performance improvements, like the 18 percent gain in hot, high takeoffs, with a few simple upgrades. We’re used to seeing remarkable gains in other areas of our technological lives, but in aviation, getting these kinds of gains with a nearly 50-year-old product is unheard of.
The most noticeable of these improvements is the winglets, and, no, they aren’t just for a flashier look, though they manage to pull off that feat too. The winglets, created by BLR, a longtime partner and supplier to Hawker Beechcraft, are made mostly of carbon fiber for light weight, so they add much in terms of performance while nearly nothing in terms of weight.
The tips increase the wingspan by 3 feet 5 inches to 57 feet 11 inches, though the effective span increases even more than that. The wingtips have built-in position, recognition and strobe lights, though they are not covered by boot extensions (expect that option to be offered at some point by the company or BLR).
Increasing the wingspan and the effective span with winglets makes sense in a variety of ways. First, the added wingspan increases lift, obviously, and the winglets act as a kind of aerodynamic fence, keeping the airflow from spilling over, losing lift and creating drag. The winglets energize that flow, making it work for the wing instead of against it. These devices work. The notion that winglets were wishful thinking in composite form has been abandoned by nearly every turbine airplane manufacturer today. Everyone uses them because they work.
In this case, they work in conjunction with a pair of other technological enhancements, the first of which is as old as the airplane itself: the propeller. Hawker Beechcraft went with composites again, in the form of new, four-bladed composite Hartzell props, which do several good things for performance and more.
For starters, the props are lighter, which makes up for weight gained in other places on the airplane. They also provide greater thrust, which is seen mainly in two places, in takeoff performance, as already noted, and in climb.
There’s an added bonus: The props are quieter than their aluminum predecessors, a fact that everyone at the company who has flown the airplane and who lives in the vicinity of the airport knows, but which has not been verified by HBC.
On top of their performance and low noise, the props boast two great features that are not new but bear note. One feature is an electronic synchrophaser, allowing the pilot to easily keep the props in sync. It will make you forget that it’s not always that easy. The other is one that on its own has sold airplanes, Mohler told me: automatic feathering. When an engine loses power, the system automatically feathers the prop and adds rudder, all in the matter of a couple of seconds, to make the loss of an engine at low altitude a no-brainer. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this feature to safety.
We tried out the latter and it worked as advertised. Cutting the fuel to the right engine (at the safe altitude of 12,000 feet), the system immediately feathered the prop and applied left rudder. On departure I could have done nothing but flown the airplane and it would have worked out just fine. Try that in a Baron. Actually, please don’t.
The last of the three big improvements that make the 250 the 250 is a new ram-air recovery system that makes the airplane as powerful with the ice vanes deployed as without. When the vanes are deployed — to prevent ice damage or foreign object damage when you’re on the ground — the system modifies the inlet flow so that more air gets to the engine, cooling it more effectively and allowing for more power with lower temps. It’s simple and ingenious, and it works.
While it’s hard to say exactly how much each new feature — winglets, props and ram-air recovery — has done to improve overall performance, it’s clear that between them they have made a big difference.
To the Test
Heading out of Wichita, Kansas’ Beech Field (KBEC) in the 250, I was accompanied by Mohler and King Air specialist Justin Phillips. With the three of us aboard and just the mains full, we were about 1,000 pounds below the maximum takeoff weight of 12,500 pounds. That would have been around an additional five passengers, for whom there was plenty of room and plenty of snacks. The galley is first rate.
It was a scuzzy day in Wichita, and we waited in the run-up area while a pair of Texan IIs (another HBC product) arrived on the overhead and executed touch-and-goes. I back-taxied the 250 to near the end and set the power. Even with the torque set conservatively to 2,000 pounds instead of 2,200, I hit my rotation speed of 97 knots and lifted off well before the 2,000-foot marker. I estimated the takeoff roll at right around 1,800 feet, which is better than book on slightly reduced power.
We were soon in the clouds and flying a heading, and I got to experience the joy of hand-flying a King Air in the soup. The secret is manual trim. In its wisdom Beech has retained the big, manual, elevator trim wheel, which gives you all the feel and responsiveness that electric trim doesn’t.
Like the last couple of models before it, the King Air 250 is outfitted with Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21 avionics, a full-featured suite with good-size LCDs and the Collins FMS-3000 with multiple navigation sources. Pilots get a raft of utilities: Jeppesen charts, XM Weather, TCAS, TAWS, onboard weather radar and a full complement of engine instruments on the MFD. Pilots coming to Pro Line 21 from a G1000-based flight deck will find the transition at first difficult, in part because the logic of the FMS is so different from that which Garmin has used for more than a decade on its various products. That said, once pilots get used to how things are done on the FMS, they find it elegant and fast.
The cockpit is a complicated place compared with those of the most modern light jets because of the built-in complexity of propellers and the fact that there’s no fadec option. On top of that, many of the functions that are incorporated into G1000 even on Beechcraft’s own piston airplanes, the G36 Bonanza and the G58 Baron, have their own lights, knobs or indicators on the Pro Line 21 suite in the King Air 250. It’s an airplane that requires training, and HBC offers two pilots a full initial King Air course at FlightSafety (plus one for a mechanic).
As we climbed, getting vectored by Departure this way and that to avoid some moderate buildups, I was impressed by the King Air’s easy flyability and predictable manners, as well as by its performance. At 1,700 rpm, a setting that really quiets the cabin, we were seeing between 1,500 and 2,000 fpm as we headed up to the 20s.
At 28,000 feet (ISA +9) at 1,700 rpm, we were truing out at 302 knots, which is about 6 knots better than book, this while burning around 650 pounds (around 100 gallons) per hour. Remember, this is for a 12,500-pound airplane. A lot of operators, Mohler predicted, will fly this airplane high, because it gets up to altitude so quickly and because its fuel economy is so impressive in the mid-30s. At FL 330 we were getting 280 knots at around 480 pounds per hour. It was worth the climb.
Cabin First
Perhaps HBC’s most remarkable engineering achievement is making the King Air cabin seem so much bigger than it is, and that’s plenty big to begin with. You can get between eight and 10 people in the airplane, counting a belted lavatory seat. With a single club layout plus two rear-facing seats at the front of the cabin, the layout is convenient and comfortable. Thanks to big, round windows with effective polarizer shades, the lighting is excellent. The big, solid and sleepable seats are set up to slide out into the aisle and to angle in any direction while en route, so you can get away from the sidewall and position the seat to give you the most clearance from other passengers. The great hard-sided lav is in back. You can access bags in flight in the rear pressurized baggage area, and because it’s right next to the airstair door, there’s no need to haul bags through the aisle to get them stowed.
Touching Down
On our way south into Austin, Texas, soon after we were beyond Dallas’ Class Bravo airspace, it was time to begin our descent. We entered the crossing altitude of 13,000 feet into the FMS and started down. The Collins autopilot, by the way, is first rate.
Another advantage of the 250 was immediately clear, the increase in Vmo from .52 Mach to .58, which allowed us to keep our speed up during the descent and will make for quicker arrivals and less fuel burned.
We flew the ILS to 17L at Bergstrom amidst lots of business and airline traffic, so Approach asked us to keep our speed up to 170 knots, which was easy enough despite gusty conditions by using the trend monitor on the Collins PFD airspeed tape.
Coming in on final a little fast, because of the gusty conditions and my lack of recent King Air time, I was still able to plant it near the aiming mark and easily make the Juliet turnoff without anything dramatic in the way of propeller or wheel braking. I figured a ground roll of around 2,500 to 3,000 feet even given my less-than-top-notch proficiency on the airplane. And I could have made it a good deal shorter with more aggressive braking.
The King Air 250 should be certified by the time you read this, at which point it will take its rightful place in the long line of remarkable airplanes called King Airs. With its combination of speed, excellent runway performance, creature comforts and, don’t forget, that great cabin, the 250 is indeed a worthy heir.
