Not many people have flown (or even seen) a Turbine Duke. It’s Rocket Engineering’s lesser known conversion STC, where they turn a Beechcraft Duke into a Royal Turbine Duke by mounting two hefty -35 PT6 engines on it. Joe sat down with Rodney Clark, an owner/pilot of one of the finest Royal Turbine Dukes in…
I get a lot of questions from piston drivers about the true performance of the Jetprop. So, I made a video of the performance of a PT6-34 powered Jetprop in cruise. This video was made in the heat of the summer, and hence the airplane has a fairly low cruise KTAS. In the colder months,…
Skyhawk vs Cherokee, Centurion vs Saratoga, Cub vs Champ, Citation vs BeechJet…there’s much passionate debate in the aviation world about which airplane type is best compared to its closest competitor for each class of airplane. One of the greatest debates amongst type clubs exists between pilots of the King Air and the Mitsubishi MU2. Since…
There’s something special about flying a Biplane. It is a catalyst for all the aviation sensory perceptions…a smorgasbord for everything you smell, feel, see, and hear. When the engine coughes to life, the small amount of oil that almost always exists in the bottom cylinders gets burned and exhausted into a belch of smoke and the…
I recently had the opportunity to be a part of the sale (and training) of a BE60T Royal Turbine, or “Royal Duke” (what we called it). The experience allowed me to gain significant flight time in the Royal Duke, so I thought it would be beneficial to give a “PIREP”. The piston Duke was considered by many to…
2011 is going to remembered as the year of a really severe drought. This has been a punishing summer for Texans and (as of this writing) there is no end in sight (we need a good tropical depression to camp out over the state for a few days!). One of the cool things about the…