Beech 56TC Turbo Baron (1967)

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BYMARK M. LACAGNINA At 40 gph~ this piston twin buys peace of mind and King Air speed. AOPA PILOT. 29 ,'tmtillucd the first pilot to make a round-trip, transcontinental flight in a rotary-wing aircraft. When he was not touring the autogiro, Miller managed Poughkeep- sie Airport and one of the first aircraft repair shops in the country. Ouring his early career, Miller also joined the Ma- rine Reserve and was trained as a na- val aviator. Wasps were very reliable engines, and Miller never did find out how a Boeing 2470 would react to an engine failure over the Rockies. He left United Airlines after two years to test-fly John Kellett's "wingless" autogiros. With Kellett, Miller logged another first-the first scheduled operation of a rotary- wing aircraft. It was a demonstration project for Eastern Airlines. Ten times each day, for a year, Miller flew a six- mile route between the Philadelphia airport and the roof of the city's post office, carrying up to 350 pounds of mail in an autogiro. World War II inter- rupted the project, and Miller turned to flying the line in Oouglas OC-2s and -3s for Eastern and test-flying amphibi- ous naval aircraft for Columbia Air- craft. He went on to fly OC-4s and -7s and Lockheed Constellations and Elec- tras for Eastern. Miller retired as a OC-8 captain in 1965. Now 78 years old, Miller, AOPA 58843, often still flies over the Rockies, but the trips are much more comfortable than they were in the right seat of a Boeing 2470. The ramifications of an engine failure are clear. If his airplane should lose an engine, he can feather it and climb. Miller's airplane is a 1967 Beech 56TC Turbo Baron. (His other airplane is a 1951 Bonanza-the first Model C35 off the line.) The Turbo Baron is a rare bird and a hot rod. Introduced in PHOTOGRAPHY BY WIL.I.IAM A. FORD Cockpit small talk inevitably would succumb to the per- vading drone of the Pratt & Whitney Wasps. The sound was reassuring, and the young copilot tried not to dwell on what might hap- pen if the engines' duet should become a solo performance. He knew the as- surances by airline management that the Boeing 2470's single-engine ser- vice ceiling. was higher than the high- est mountain peak along the route. He also knew this might be perfectly true under standard conditions; but condi- tions on the route from Cheyenne to Oakland seldom were standard. No one knew what would happen once the aircraft drifted down into the clouds and began to pick up ice. The copilot did not want to be the one to find out. Although only 31 years old, the co- pilot, John MacOonald Miller, already was an experienced and seasoned avia- tor. He had learned to fly when flight instruction was a do-it-yourself affair. His reward for a hard summer's work assisting a barnstormer had been the barnstormer's airplane-a Curtiss IN-4 in atrocious condition. On his third flight, Miller began hopping passengers in the Jenny from a pasture near his home in Poughkeepsie, New York. Af- ter high school and a degree in me- chanical engineering from Pratt Insti- tute, he worked as a mechanic for a flying circus. He rebuilt a wrecked Standard J-1 and set off on his own to barnstorm the eastern states. In the early 1930s, Miller bought a Pitcairn PCA-2 autogiro and for three years gave aerobatic exhibitions all over the country. He performed loops, rolls on top of the loops and other maneuvers that did not have names. He became TURBO BARON The 56TC is a rare bird, a 760-harsepawer hat rod built far anly five years. nll/tillllt',I 1967, the Model 56TC was the same size as the C55 Baron (albeit a bit heavier; 5,990 versus 5,300 pounds), had as much power as the Queen Air and was a few knots faster than Beech's flagship, the A90 King Air. Each of the Turbo Baron's 540-cubic- inch Lycoming engines produces 380 horsepower at 41.5 inches and 2,900 rpm, maximum continuous power. Sin- gle-engine rate of climb varies from 32. OCTOBER 1984 412 fpm at sea level to 50 fpm at 18,600 feet. With both engines produc- ing 79-percent power at 12,000, true airspeed is about 222 knots and fuel consumption is about 282 pounds (47 gallons) per hour. Only 94 Turbo Barons were built. Production dwindled from 51 airplanes in 1967 to only produced two in 1971. The hot-rod Beech Turbo Baron was eclipsed by the Duke, introduced in All allgle-of-attack illdicator alld a low-tllrust detector supplemellt N516Q's pallc/. A StorTI/scope is to replace tile coffee call lid. late 1968 with 380-hp engines and a pressurized cabin. There were few changes to the origi- nal design of the Turbo Baron. Beech switched from vacuum pumps to' pres- sure pumps after the first year of pro- duction. In 1970, the model designa- tion was changed to A56TC. There were some tweaks to the panel layout and to the flap system, but the most significant change was baffled fuel r TURBO BARON tanks. The baffles were installed to prevent unporting. Beech also offered baffle kits for retrofitting earlier Turbo Barons. Unmodified 56TCs have plac- ards prohibiting takeoff, slips and skids with less than 25 gallons of fuel in each of the main fuel tanks. Miller bought his Turbo Baron, N516Q, in 1971 and bases it at Dutchess County Airport in Pough- keepsie. The C35 Bonanza shares a T- hangar next to the Baron's with two Mazda RX-3 automobiles that he is re- storing. Miller uses an RE-5 Rotary Suzuki motorcycle when the weather is nice to make the commute between his home and his airplanes. A certified airframe and powerplant mechanic, Miller does most of the work on his airplanes himself. His 35,000 hours of flying has left him with a strong motivation to avoid sur- prises, and he has installed a number of supplementary performance- and hardware-monitoring systems in the Baron. It has an Advanced Aero Safety low-thrust detection system, which provides aural and visual warnings of a