The Duchess is a very nice handling twin, with an excellent
electrical dual bus system. It has real redundancy although
it does not have automatic load shedding. The engines are
nearly bullet-proof. Two cabin doors and good sized baggage
door make loading nice. There is no nose baggage
compartment. You can install radar. It has plenty of
elevator and rudder and is very easy to recover. Beech
actually did the full spin test series, but decided not to
certify for intentional spinning. But it will recover if
you're ham fisted enough to get into a spin.

The airplane pretty decent single-engine performance for a
non-turbo light piston twin. The engine nacelles are trim
enough it flies well on either engine. The Piper light twin
carries the fuel in gigantic nacelles tanks, Piper didn't
want to change the Cherokee much, as a result there is a lot
of drag between the nacelles and fuselage. Piper also did
not increase the size or arm on the tail, so it doesn't have
the range the Duchess has.

The Baron will be much more expensive to operate whether
you're talking insurance, fuel or maintenance.

The only bad thing about the Duchess is no nose baggage and
only four seats. The aft compartment is big.

I'd like to have two of them, one factory standard and one
on amphibious floats and 220 hp engines.



--
James H. Macklin
ATP,CFI,A&P

wrote in message
...
| I've contemplating buying my first plane.
|
| C182 is almost perfect for what Iwant to do with the
plane.
| alas the last few flights have had some significant
overwater legs.
| CRQ-AVX-SBA
| I also want to be able to comfortably return home after
dark.
|
| Thus I was thinking about a light twin, something like a
barron or
| C310 would be nice, but getting a really nice one is
probably
| streching my budget.
|
| I'll usually be carrying about 400 lbs of people, pilot
and bags.
|
| I see a bunch of duchess for sale around the same price as
a similarly
| equipped 182.
|
|
| The simple engines with 2000 TBO and no boots, hot [props
etc...
| should make the costs a bit lower than the 310 or B58
|
| Any comments from people that have owned one?
|
| Any comments from anyone that uses one in a flight school
(seems to be
| the most common MEL trainer)
|
| Paul