Three weeks after purchasing a 1996 Beechcraft King Air 350 in the summer of 2017, Daniel Herr was off on the first of many grand family vacations. His family of four took off from their home airport of Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pennsylvania, headed for a West Coast adventure. He had ideal weather for the challenging terrain at Mammoth Yosemite Airport (KMMH). After mountain biking at Mammoth and hiking at Yosemite National Park, they flew an approach to minimums at Arcata, California, to stand among the giant redwoods (and to drive their car through one). On the eastbound return, they took in a rodeo and went white water rafting in Cody, Wyoming. The final stop was to spend time with close family in Watertown, South Dakota.
Ambitious and safe family vacations are the primary reason Herr, an 8,200-hour pilot, owns an airplane. In 2006, he had purchased his first airplane, a Cessna 421, after years of “freeloading” – flying his dad’s Cessna Turbo Skylane RG and his friends’ Piper Dakota. Herr’s flying background includes flight instructing, night freight, charter and fractional.
The 421 came before he and his wife, Kay, had daughter Elizabeth and son Wilmer. It served them well until the kids got older and the vacations stretched farther afield. Herr felt that the frequency of trips with long legs, combined with mountainous terrain in the West, was asking a lot of the twin Cessna.
Harbor, Maine; Titusville, Florida; and Ketchikan, Alaska; and to visit extended family in South Dakota.
Kay, who has her private pilot certificate and instrument rating, comes up with challenges such as seeing every state or visiting all the national parks. Dan acts as the flight department and meticulously plans the routes.
“I try to make it look easy but it’s phenomenal how much time I spend on trip arranging and departure planning. Even with an Aircraft Performance Group subscription, I frequently have to print out approach plates to plot the engine-out route and then create GPS user waypoints for the route. The King Air 350 has Transport Category runway performance numbers: balanced field lengths just like a jet. As a single pilot, I can’t match the safety level of a two-pilot crew as a fractional operator, but I strive to take advantage of the level of safety offered by the 350. I pour a lot of effort into training and maintenance. Safety is further enhanced by the 350’s enormous useful load. With full fuel, my family and luggage, I am more than 1,300 pounds below gross weight. As the pilot, I’m the weakest link in the equation. I work hard not to squander the safety that the 350 affords,” he said.
In seven years of operating FL-136, the Herr family typically takes a week vacation at spring break, two weeks over the summer, several trips around major holidays, and a few short weekend excursions. Family visits – his mother’s family is in South Dakota and Kay’s family is in Florida – are 1,000 nautical mile trips.
Last summer’s Alaskan adventure marked the 50-state milestone for Herr, Kay and Elizabeth (Wilmer is still needs to visit Vermont). The Alaskan tour, comprising more than 30 flight hours, required the most arduous planning of any family vacation to date. Challenging terrain, inclement weather, long distances and a dearth of hotels and rental cars made alternate planning tricky. “I see why so many people visit Alaska on a cruise ship,” Herr said. The family’s route in their King Air included landing in Ketchikan to ride the ferry from the island airport into town for lunch, before flying on to Anchorage. They also visited Nome, Fairbanks for mountain biking, rafting and fishing, and they spent time at Denali National Park, which the family said lived up to its billing of spectacular and varied wildlife. They stopped in Juneau to visit family and enjoyed a spectacular private whale watch cruise on a 30-foot boat.
Spring break 2024 was a trip to Houston, with an overnight in Tullahoma, Tennessee, where Herr said the entire family enjoyed the Beechcraft Heritage Museum. “The museum’s human-interest storylines of Olive Ann Beech, Walter Beech and air-racer Louise Thaden bring life to the beautifully restored airplanes: Travel Airs, Staggerwings, Beech 18s and many more,” he said, adding that he is eager for the King Air Gathering to return to Beech Heritage Museum.
They’ll spend the Fourth of July with family in South Dakota, then summer vacation will take them to the island of Newfoundland – “It’s Maine on steroids,” said Herr, who visited the eastern Canada vacation spot with his wife before kids.
This fall, they’ll begin regularly flying to Manhattan, Kansas, where their daughter will start her freshman year studying Animal Science at Kansas State University.
“Flying our own aircraft is a great luxury and a blessing in my life and for my family,” Herr said. “It’s brought us a lot of experiences that we otherwise wouldn’t have had. We’ve been able to get off the beaten path to see national parks, small towns, antique tractor shows, farm shows and cowboy music concerts. The King Air also makes it easy to visit family in South Dakota. Without the airplane, maybe we would only have a token South Dakota trip every year or every few years. The airplane enhances our quality of life and sustains family connections despite the 1,000 miles between us.”
A lifelong interest in aviation
Herr grew up in New Jersey, where he currently resides, among a family of recreational pilots. He spent a lot of time in the family’s Cessna Skyhawk alongside his father, a farmer and lawyer. Cost-cutting grounded the Skyhawk as well as the teenaged Herr. But when Herr was 16, his father’s flight instructor Floyd Evans, who was also a dear family friend and TWA captain, volunteered to teach Herr if his dad would cover the airplane rental at Alexandria Field Airport in Pittstown, New Jersey.
“Floyd liked to tell people that he soloed me in three hours, but it was really 103 hours. I had well over 100 hours of time flying with dad in earlier years in the family Skyhawk. Dad wasn’t a CFI, so none of the time was loggable, but it was worthwhile time,” said Herr, who started the lessons with Evans during the summer of 1982. Herr received his private certificate in 1983 and his instrument rating in 1984. With his IFR ticket in hand, he thought his training was wrapped up for a while. Floyd had other plans. During his two weeks of college spring break in 1985, Herr added a commercial certificate, as well as CFI and CFII ratings, all at the age of 18.
“Floyd had a profound impact on my life,” Herr stated. “While it was impressive that he got me so many ratings so quickly, his biggest impact was convincing me to get my CFI. It is not that the CFI certificate itself was important, rather it was profoundly important how Floyd believed in me and saw that I could accomplish something that seemed, to me, so far beyond my reach. As a CFI, I was teaching people who were two or three times my age – and I was earning their trust and respect. My perception of my own capabilities, of what could be achieved if I worked at it, expanded tremendously.”
Herr flight instructed through college, and after graduation he took a job as an underwriter for an aviation insurance company. He was able to fly the company’s Beechcraft Bonanzas regularly and moonlighted as a night freight pilot flying Cessna 310s. In his next job, selling industrial equipment, he would often borrow his father’s plane, by then upgraded to a Cessna Turbo Skylane RG, to capture aerial facility photos that he’d send to potential customers as a sales follow-up.
Next, he flew full time for a New Jersey-based charter company and was a captain for the fractional aircraft operator NetJets, flying Cessna Citation Ultras. The seed for his own business venture was first planted while working at the charter company. When not flying, he was talking to prospective owners of turboprops and jets about putting their aircraft on the charter certificate. Those owners would sometimes send him contracts from competing companies, including fractional operators.
“I hadn’t been to law school, but with a grandfather and two parents who were lawyers, I’d been around the family law practice and legal seminars all of my life,” Herr said. “I read these fractional contracts and saw promises by the programs to cover costs that were highly variable. I knew these promises couldn’t hold and that owners were going to be surprised.”
In 2002, a friend’s parents asked him to review the costs of their fractional shares and Herr was able to save them a substantial sum. He started consulting for fractional owners – and quickly figured out that to best protect his clients, he needed to be an attorney so that he could revise the contracts before his clients purchased their fractional shares. He completed his law degree in 2005 and morphed the consulting business into a law practice. His firm, FractionalLaw, works with fractional aircraft owners to help them minimize their hassles and expenses, protect their legal interests and optimize their fractional ownership.
“In one sense, I’m in this glamorous fractional industry, but in reality, I’m in my office with my spreadsheets working on residual values, downgrade ratios and Consumer Price Index adjustments,” Herr said. “Much of it is tedious administrative work, but I do it because I love my clients and I like the overall package.”
Of the 100 to 150 hours he flies the King Air each year, Herr said fewer than 15% are business hours. “But the business impact of those hours is outsized. Being an airplane owner and pilot provides many soft benefits, from credibility in the industry to insider knowledge. I was chatting with the line guys at Telluride one day. They mentioned which operators pay attention to the 10-knot tail wind limit and which don’t. I use that intelligence when advising my clients on which fractional programs to use and which to avoid,” he said. Herr’s typical business trips are to Kansas City to meet with appraisers, to NBAA seminars, to OEMs to look at new airplane models headed into the fractional fleets and to fractional programs themselves. “When meeting with companies based at an airport, it is invaluable to show up by airplane.”
A complicated upgrade from
the Cessna 421C
The upgrade itch began in 2016, 10 years into Herr’s ownership of the Cessna 421C. His two children were 10 and eight years old, and the expanding radius of family trips called for more performance. “I wanted turbine reliability, increased engine-out performance and the ability to fly higher and farther,” he said. The upgrade dream switched into high gear when Herr received an unsolicited offer, relayed by his maintenance shop, to purchase his Cessna 421C. The offer was too high to pass up, so he sold it despite not having a replacement. A dry lease of a Pilatus PC-12 NG based at Herr’s home airport filled the gap during his airplane search.
Initially, King Airs were not on Herr’s list of prospects. One of his first experiences flying the famous line of turboprops was as a charter pilot in the mid-1990s. He regularly transported a family from New Jersey to Florida in the charter company’s B200. With full fuel and two pilots (per charter policy), there was just 400 pounds of useful load left. Herr perceived the B200 as a wonderful airplane for 500-mile corporate legs, but not well suited for long legs hauling his family and luggage.
While he came to love the build quality and reliability of the Pilatus during the dry lease period, the PC-12 did not make Herr’s short list. With his low utilization, the PC-12’s savings in fuel did not come close to offsetting the high capital cost. In addition, Herr and his wife disliked how the Pilatus rides in turbulence. “With its engine mass located inline with the fuselage, the Pilatus has a low rolling moment of inertia.”
In the lower capital cost category, Herr considered the Cessna 441, Twin Commander 1000, Fairchild Merlin IIIC and Fairchild Merlin 300 – making multiple offers on the latter two but never landing a deal.
“During the depths of my Merlin funk, I had a fortuitous encounter with a corporate pilot who had flown both Merlins IIICs and another SFAR 41 aircraft, King Air 300s. He told me to investigate King Air 300s. I was impressed with what I found: great useful load, a relatively liquid market, eligible for a Garmin 1000 upgrade and shops everywhere that know how to work on them. Compared to a Merlin IIIC, the King Air 300 has better runway numbers, better single-engine performance, better speed but less range, more fuel burn and a lower cabin differential of only 6.6 psi. Every airplane is a compromise. I decided that the King Air 300 offered a reasonable set of compromises for my mission.”
He hired John Murphy of Murphy Acquisitions to help. “I am a hands-on guy who is good at educating myself,” Herr said. “I had plunged into the Merlins and learned an extraordinary amount, but I did not feel comfortable wading into the King Air market without assistance.” Herr describes John as a gentleman of the highest caliber who knew the King Air market inside and out. Over the course of nine months, Herr said he made offers on six 300 models: two offers were rejected, one seller changed his mind as he flew to the inspection facility, two deals died in contract negotiation, and Herr rejected one plane during the inspection phase. Meanwhile, in October 2016, Herr got his type rating from Potomac Flight Training, which had a King Air 300 simulator as well as a real King Air 300 equipped with a Garmin G1000.
“At this stage, John suggested I take a look at the 350 market,” Herr said. “When I had hired John, I told him explicitly that I didn’t want a 350: the 300 cabin is already bigger than I need, the 300 has better runway numbers because it isn’t hauling around an extra 700 pounds in empty weight that does me no good and the larger 350 will cost me more to hangar. Despite my anti-350 bias, I did some research. I discovered that 350 models FL-111 and later had improved runway numbers thanks to a lower Vmc and an Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) waiver to use transport rules rather than commuter rules. These later 350s – or earlier ones that have been retrofitted – can have better runway numbers than a 300: the 350 can have balanced field length where the 300 doesn’t even have accelerate-stop. But the 300 does have the flexibility to depart Telluride (KTEX) or Mammoth Yosemite Airport (KLXV), both in Colorado, at 12,500 pounds (no accelerate-stop required), whereas the 350 needs cool temps and to be reasonably light. Other plusses for the 350 are improved annunciator panel logic, a slightly-improved electrical system and a little more useful load.”
Murphy found FL-136, a 1996 model 350 with only two previous owners (both U.S.), complete logs and a worthy maintenance history. The airplane was priced accordingly for having engines 400 hours from overhaul, as well as paint and interior that would eventually need attention.
“The 1996 King Air 350 cost me no more to buy than a comparable 1988 King Air 300 with its price bumped for eight model years,” Herr said. “In other words, I paid more because it was newer, but I didn’t pay anything extra for it being a 350 rather than a 300. That was my rationalization. Even better on the value scale, back in 2017, there wasn’t much demand for used King Air 350s. Companies avoided them because they didn’t want the hassle and expense of hiring type-rated pilots. I paid less for my 350 than I would have paid for a comparable B200 with Blackhawk engines. For an owner-pilot willing to get a type rating, the 350 was a compelling bargain back in 2017.”
Herr took possession of FL-136 July 31. The following week he completed two days of training in his airplane with his type rating instructor. “It felt good to get put through the paces and to review some intricacies of the systems,” he said. “I am proud of my decision to seek training that wasn’t required. I knew I needed it and I felt much better about my capabilities afterward.”
He put those capabilities into action quickly: it was mid-August when he departed for Mammoth Lakes with the family for their first grand adventure in the King Air.
He’s since had many adventures and replaced his older serial number engines with a used set of the PK series of the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-60A. Other improvements include Raisbeck dual aft body strakes, Raisbeck swept props and Garmin G1000 NXi avionics installed by Stevens Aviation. Still on the wish list: CenTex saddle tanks to ensure nonstop legs on 1,000nm trips with winter headwinds, new paint and an interior refurb. In the pie-in-the-sky category, Herr would love to be able to replace the engine-driven air conditioning compressor with an electric compressor. “Being able to cool the cabin before engine start has been a common feature in other planes since the 1980s. Even my 421 had it. I’m astounded that Beech failed to incorporate this improvement decades ago.”
Seven years into ownership of FL-136, Herr is happier than he ever imagined being in a King Air. Herr is content with his decision to opt for the King Air’s lower capital cost and higher operating expense. “When I was flying the King Air 200 for charter, lugging a family and their luggage around, I never would have pictured flying my family around – with every bit as much luggage – in a King Air,” the 57-year-old said. “I never thought I’d own a Cessna 421, much less a King Air or any airplane of this magnitude. I grew up in a Skyhawk. I’d see a Bonanza or a 210 and they seemed unobtainable, like there was a moat between my world and those airplanes. I’d say it’s a dream come true, but it’s something that my younger self never even dreamed of.”