Best Light Twin Aircraft

Best Light Twin Aircraft - Before you even board the Avanti EVO, you can appreciate the aircraft's striking beauty. Its curved aerodynamic design provides a sleek profile, while the spacious and light-filled cabin offers headroom of 5 feet 9 inches and an abundance of space for up to 8 passengers.

The standard EVO even comes with a restroom. The production of the Navajos was an important change in Piper's production because although to most it still looks like a smaller aircraft, this was the first step to creeping into the world of bigger aircraft.

Best Light Twin Aircraft

The same holds true for most light twins. Aero Commanders, Aerostars, Aztecs, Barons, and Cessna 320s, 340s, and 414s. If you want to haul appreciably more load than a Cessna 210 can carry for any significant distance, you'd need to look at a big heavy twin like the Cessna 402 or 421 or Piper Navajo.

Recurrent Training

For more than five decades, active and dedicated aircraft owners and pilots have turned to AVIATION CONSUMER to answer their most important buying questions. This website contains many older reviews. Unless otherwise noted, these reviews carry product pricing from the time of the original review.

When Italy's leading aerospace manufacturing company released the Piaggio Avanti EVO, they delivered on three key business demands. speed, comfort, and cost-effectiveness. Piaggio Aerospace blended the very best in Italian design with superb craftsmanship to create a high-performance aircraft that not only turns heads for its dashing looks, but also for its superior performance and amenities.

It is not far from the truth to say that the main role of a light twin's second engine is to overcome its own drag and to carry its own weight and the weight of the additional fuel it requires!

The Pilatus PC-12 NGX was built for versatility. It's perfect for business executives, with up to 10 passengers treated to a real office in the sky with the latest entertainment and communication devices, as well as reliable wifi and USB ports.

Are Twins Safer?

Designed in conjunction with BMW, you can choose from six flashy interior packages featuring European leathers and ergonomic seating. In theory, a complex machine like my known-ice-equipped, turbocharged, twin-engine T310R should have a lot more problems than a simpler aircraft like a Cessna 182 (my firstairplane).

The twin has so many complex systems...so many more things to go wrong. When I open up my aircraft at the annual and look at it with all its guts exposed, I'm sometimes amazed that such a complex machine works at all.

Flying in style is what you'll get with the Diamond DA62. Not only is it where modern concepts meet ideas from the 60s, but it was also designed with ideas of safety from the motor industry while still giving a great performance.

Finally, we assume you know this but well say it anyway. Have a thorough pre-purchase inspection done by your mechanic, not someone suggested by the seller. We have seen too many buyers enticed into a good deal on a twin only to find it needed repairs beyond the value of the airplane.

The Skymaster A Different Twin

If you fly a lot of thunderstorms, weather radar is nice-and twins provide the radome area and panel space for a first-class radar installation. You can put radar in a single, too, but the small pod-mounted antenna reduces its range and resolution sharply.

My 310 has no radar, only a Stormscope, but so far it has done a great job of keeping me out of trouble. Raising the flaps just before touchdown seems to help, but there are more than a few practitioners of this arcane art who have hit the gear switch instead.

The attitude of the airplane on the ground means that on takeoff, unless you replace the nosewheel with a smaller diameter version, the airplane can get airborne below Vmc. Attempting to hold it to a sensible Vmc plus 5 knots results in wheelbarrowing.

Those who have installed a smaller diameter nosewheel report that this (mostly) solves the problem. Twin-piston aircraft may provide an improved speed, however, this does not come without the increased cost of fuel and pilots requiring extra training to get their twin rating, as only having a PPL limits pilots to specific jobs.

Weather Flying

It's not easy to achieve and maintain proficiency in a piston twin. Engine-out emergencies are difficult to practice realistically in the airplane without jeopardizing safety, and engine cuts can be very tough on the engines, particularly in turbocharged models.

As the name suggests, the Caravan is a people mover, with the capacity to transport 11 passengers in comfort with easy "air-stair" boarding and ample luggage space of 342 lbs. You can customize the seating arrangement of the cabin to match your mission and optimize revenue on each flight, although the color scheme is limited.

It's narrow wing-span, and short take-off make the Kodiak a master of tight airspaces and mini runways, while the robust gear means it can handle the toughest terrain. But there's more brain behind the brawn; with 21st-century technology, the Kodiak offers situational awareness, integrated autopilot, and navigation assistance for safer flying in all weather conditions.

The question of whether twins are really any safer than singles is guaranteed to trigger a vigorous debate in any group of pilots. I recently finished editing a Cessna 310 safety review for the AOPA Air Safety Foundation.

If You Decide To Take The Plunge

In the course of this project, I took an in-depth look at the safety record of the Cessna 310 and a group of comparable aircraft (Aerostar, Aztec, Baron, Commander, Crusader) during the eleven year period from 1982 through 1992. Some interesting statistics

emerged from this study. The 310 looks like a much bigger aircraft than the 210. Max gross is about 2,000 pounds more. 5,500 versus 3,500 pounds. But this can be deceiving. Useful load is only 400 lbs.more-1,600 versus 1,200 pounds-and on long legs that difference is fully consumed by the additional fuel the twin needs to carry.

The power levers are not coded by shape. On early Apaches, all of them were painted black, although later versions were color-coded. Instrument location seems almost random, leading to some head turning when flying IFR and potential vertigo.

Most Apaches have 36-gallon main fuel tanks and 18-gallon auxiliary tanks. The bladder fuel tanks seem to last for about 10 years before needing replacement; check that on pre-buy. Keeping the door latched in flight is a significant consideration so the latching mechanism should be checked regularly.

Theres an AD for cracks in the forward wing spar carry-through structure. We also recommend keeping track of the five-year overhaul on the Hartzell props, no small expense if needed. The American Bonanza Society has classes and support directed specifically to the Travel Air.

We recommend joining even before buying a Travel Air as the organization has a great deal of information available for the prospective purchaser that might preclude latching onto a dog. In the 50s and 60s, most pilots went over and above their private licensing and got their twin-engine ratings.

The reason for this was that many WWII pilots had much preferred flying multi-engine aircraft. This created an already waiting market for new twin-piston aircraft that was bound to come. Handling and Performance The Apache shares the same airfoil with the J-3 Cub.

Amazingly, an Apache can depart over a 50-foot obstacle in 1100 feet if everything is done precisely. However, Vx in that maneuver is so slow that if an engine fails, the airplane will roll, so you'll either hit the obstacle upright or the ground inverted.

A more realistic distance for obstruction clearance is 1500 feet, which still isn't bad. The Apache is one of the few twins we would base at an airport having only 3000 feet of runway. Piper claimed the Apache would cruise at 150 to 160 knots;

an absolute fantasy. At 65 to 70 percent power, it will bumble along at around 135 knots, burning about 15 GPH. Do yourself a favor by looking at lots of airplanes before you decide to buy one.

Try not to be influenced by cosmetics like paint and interior - it's what's under the floorboards and inside the nacelles that really matters. There are a number of one-time ADs but only one repetitive one without a cure.

Its a 100-hour dye-penetrant inspection of the main gear A-frames. If you are buying, insist that all one-time ADs be completed. The statistics showed that a light twin is about equally likely to have a mechanical-caused accident as a high-performance single.

But the twin's mechanical problem is most likely to be gear-related while the single's is most likely to be engine/prop-related. A single is about two-and-a-half times more likely to have an accident due to engine/prop failure than a twin (8% versus 3%).

And if we assume that atwin is twice as likely to have an engine/prop failure (since it has twice as many to fail), then we can conclude that an engine/prop failure in a single is five times more likely to result in an accident than

an engine/prop failure in a twin. As it did with the Comanche and Lance, Piper made a twin out of the fuselage of a successful single, the Arrow IV. The choice of 180 HP Lycomings as opposed to lower power was wise, particularly in light of the stellar reputation of the O-360s.

When I first bought my T310R, I was really excited about having all that deicing equipment. But after flying it in all sorts of weather for nearly a decade, I've found that the utility of the deicing gear is greatly overrated.

It isn't that the boots and hotprops don't work-they do-but that they are so rarely needed when flying a turbocharged aircraft. Turbocharging gives you such a wide choice of altitudes between the MEA and the service ceiling that there's almost always an ice-free altitude to be found.

I'd guess I've actually accumulated enough ice to use the boots perhaps a half-dozen times since I bought the aircraft-and in none of those cases did I consider having the boots to be a decisive advantage (in most cases I was descending through an

icing layer into warmer air that would have melted the ice off anyway). Flight Deck Early Twin Comanches carried forward the Piper predilection for installing gauges in vertigo-inducing locations. In 1968, the standard T-panel arrived, a substantial improvement.

The fuel selector and gauging systems require review and understanding, particularly on the airplanes with tip tanks; more than one pilot has come to grief due to fuel mismanagement with a full tank available. The wastegate for the turbochargers is not automatic.

A separate set of knobs control the turbos after the pilot sets the throttles. It adds to the workload significantly and should be part of an extensive checkout for those who make a purchase. In fact, the Skymaster is one of the most maintenance-intensive airplanes that Cessna built.

It combines one of Continental's most problem-prone engines (the IO-360), a complex landing gear system (from the early 210), a poorly-designed electrical system, and some oddball systems like motorized cowl flaps. Unlike most wing-mounted twins, the Skymaster is not easy to work on, and its engine compartments are particularly tightly packed.

Flight Deck Four people inside a Seminole will be reasonably comfortable and while we would prefer a second cabin door, entry and exit is standard Cherokee; adequate, but not easy. A full fuel load allows 700 pounds in the cabin;

comfortable for three and luggage. With a maximum flight range of 1,806 nautical miles and an impressive capacity of up to 11 passengers, the Beechcraft Super King Air 350i can carry your entire office from Los Angeles to Chicago non-stop.

First released in 1972, the corporate heavy lifter has undergone 40 years of continuous innovation and improvement, making it today's best-selling business turboprop plane. The cabin is more than adequate in terms of hip and legroom, although tall pilots are a little short on headroom.

The rear seats are comfortable, however, they are stepped down slightly from the front, limiting forward visibility. But the Skymaster is an absolute delight to fly, and does things that no other twin can do. It's a superb short- and rough-field airplane.

It has no Vmc problems, and so is ideal for pilots who don't fly a lot and can't justify the costly recurrent training demanded by conventional twin. And it has the best engine-out performance of any piston-powered light twin.

The market for piston twins is a mere shadow of what it was decades ago as aircraft buyers have come to realize they can achieve about the same performance and safety from high-performance piston singles. Still, a few intriguing choices remain, including Diamond's seven-passenger DA62 diesel twin and Tecnam's Rotax-powered P2006.

Beechcraft Travel Air In the 1950s, Beech was building the massive, magnificent, Model 18 as Cessna, Aero Commander and Piper were happily discovering there was a significant market for twins with horizontally opposed, rather than round, engines.

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