Trip to Montana

At long last all my training is done and we finally got a break in the weather so we could use N46ME to fly over to our farm in Montana. It was a beautiful day, cool, calm and clear, and a quick flight over. 1 hour and 20 minutes vs. 7 hours 45 minutes to drive the same trip. If we didn’t have an airplane we would have sold the farm as the drive was getting to be way too much to deal with.
Some friends were waiting to meet us at the airport and to see the new airplane. Since the airport is at 2,460 feet in a valley and the minimum vector altitude is 10,000 feet in the area the arrival can be fun. This trip we got cleared direct to THM. About 7 miles from the airport at 10,000 feet on a course for straight in to runway 7 we had the runway in sight so we cancelled IFR. Now all we had to do is lose 7,500 feet in a little under 7 miles while going about 130 knots. That means we have got about 3 minutes to get the job done. Here is where a turbo prop is better than either a jet or a piston aircraft. Just pull back the power lever and that big propeller out front becomes a huge speed brake. Drop the gear, point the nose down and easily descend at 2,500 to 3,000 feet per minute in complete comfort and control without gaining any speed (pressurization is very nice in these situations too!). You can even slow down in this kind of descent profile if you need to. Anyway, the unexpected side effect was that the folks on the ground had never seen an airplane descend that fast so they thought something was wrong and they were about to be witnesses to a crash! At 2 mile final we intercepted the VASI glidepath, added power, slowed down, added flaps and had gentle touch down. In the Mirage that same situation would have required a circling descent of about two turns adding an extra 4 minutes to the flight and having us maneuvering near an airport, generally a bad idea.
Given the relative economy and increased flexibility of a single engine turbo prop over the soon to come new Very Light Jets it will be interesting to see how the mix goes over time. Beech (a.k.a. Raytheon) still sells a lot of King Airs at a price equal to the jet alternative. If they had continued the Starship program and continued to make improvements in that aircraft they would probably be doing even better.