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IN HISTORY
The Last Seminole
by Edward Phillips
In the late 1950s, the U.S. Army’s inventory of the versatile L-23/U-8 Seminole series of light military transports ended with introduction of the L-23F – the versatile Beechcraft that set a new standard for fixed-wing Army aviation.
Thirteen years after the end of the bloodiest conflict on earth known as World War II, Americans were riding the crest of a major postwar economic wave that put a car in every garage and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office. It was a time like no other. Consider just a few of the distant memories from that generation: Detroit’s GM, Ford and Chrysler went wild with tailfins, loads of chrome and gas-guzzling V-8 power. Drive-in theaters dotted the landscape, Wonder® Bread was in every kid’s lunchbox, Elvis was swinging his hips (but not on national TV!); nuclear fallout shelters were all the rage, pretty girls on roller skates served food to cool guys in “hot rods,” and color television was the technological marvel of the day.
In addition, the “Atomic Age” ushered in by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 had slowly given way to the “Space Age,” with the United States and the Soviet Union vying to put elementary satellites into earth orbit while quietly racing to see who would be first to successfully launch a man into outer space.
It was also an uncertain time when the Cold War between the two nuclear superpowers was heating up and would eventually come to a high-stakes stand-off in Cuba in 1962 that threatened to plunge humanity into a global nuclear holocaust.
In the world of commercial aviation, however, the late 1950s saw the “Jet Age” mature with introduction of jet-powered airliners such as the British Comet and the Boeing 707. The market for small, piston-powered aircraft was enjoying strong growth and production lines were humming at Cessna Aircraft Company, Piper Aircraft Corporation and Beech Aircraft Corporation. Beech, in particular, was strengthening its grasp on the business aviation segment that had begun in 1932 with the bullish Model 17R1, evolved into the affordable and efficient Model 17 Staggerwing during the mid-1930s and hit its stride after the war with strong sales of the twin-engine Model 18 Twin Beech.
The U.S. military had long been an operator of Beechcraft airplanes and the company’s successful Model 50 Twin Bonanza had donned the uniform of the U.S. Army in 1951 with introduction of the L-23 Seminole. The light transport proved to be a rugged, versatile addition to the Army’s fixed-wing inventory, and the L-32A was soon followed by a series of upgraded and modified aircraft over the next seven years culminating in the L-23D of 1957.1
Although the Army brass were more than pleased with the overall L-23 design, by 1958 it needed a larger airframe to cope with evolving mission requirements that included increased VIP transport, rapid troop deployment and myriad liaison duties. What the next generation Seminole needed, according to the Army, was more interior volume and horsepower, and in 1958 the Army sat down with Beech engineers to lay out the basic requirements for a follow-on design to the L-23.
Fortunately for the Army, the solution was just beginning to roll down the Beechcraft production line – the Model 65 Queen Air. First flown in August 1958, the Model 65 differed significantly from its Model 50-series predecessors because of its redesigned fuselage and that included a cabin that had been completely regenerated in
26 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
APRIL 2023