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“ ... the B100 found a ready market among die-hard TPE331 advocates ...”
top-of-the-line King Air until the 200 came along – but offering a huge performance increase, most potential A100 buyers were being convinced to spend the extra dollars to order a 200 instead. Hence, Beech was seeing a dramatic reduction in the orders for A100s.
It was this fact that led Mr. Hedrick to decide the 100-series would be the first to offer the new powerplant package. By doing so, perhaps some new interest and life could be breathed into this fine segment of the King Air model line. Eventually, however, Mr. Hedrick’s plan was to offer the choice of PT6 or TPE331 engines across all branches of the King Air family tree existing at that time: the 90-series, the 100-series and the 200-series.
By the time the TPE331-powered version of the A100 – given the designation B100, of course – was finally certificated and ready for customer deliveries, two years had elapsed and the flow of PT6s was back to its historically high abundance. Although the B100 found a ready market among die-hard TPE331 advocates, it never sold nearly as well as its big brother, the 200. A contributing factor to the lack of strong sales success for the B100, in my opinion, is that the King Air sales team had been so indoctrinated into the “PT6 good, 331 bad” school of thinking that many of the salesmen and saleswomen found it very difficult to sing the praises of this different engine to their prospective buyers.
The outcome of this lack of a strong B100 market is that Beech dropped the idea of offering the alternative powerplant across the board of King Air models. Although the factory did develop and conduct flight testing on a prototype TPE331-powered version of the F90 – it was to be known as the G90 and the prototype’s serial number was LE-0, leading the factory pilots to refer to the plane as “Leo” – the program never evolved past the testing stage. I would be quite surprised to ever see another new King Air model that utilizes a version of the 331.
B100s were only delivered over an eight-year span from 1976 through 1983. The prototype started life as an A100, serial number B-205, and was given the new serial number of BE-1. The last one manufactured in
MAY 2022
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 19