The Duke would be the way I'd go. The Duke was designed for
high altitudes and has a better panel, and cabin. The Baron
will be unstable at 300 TAS and twitchy...
For the same money, as the conversion, you could probably
buy a B or C90 King Air and have a real cabin class, but the
Duke is a nice flying airframe and it is very strong and
heavily built.

I would be most interested in prop/ground clearance issuers,
are they using 4 bladed props?


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

wrote in message
oups.com...
|I got an email response from the guys at Rocket Engineering
about their
| PT6A conversion of a P-Baron. He mentioned they're
finishing STC work
| for their turbine Duke conversion and I wondered which
airplane might
| make the better platform for conversion. Their preliminary
numbers for
| the -21 engined P-Baron are : Max climb rate 5000ft/min,
useful load
| 2050, time to climb to 25,000 7min., high speed cruise of
300+ kts at
| FL250 @ 64gph, long range cruise 250+ kts at FL250 @ 46gph
which sounds
| pretty impressive (to me, anyway) but I wonder if the Duke
would be any
| faster with the same power? I've read here previously that
the Duke is
| pretty draggy as airframes go and should/could be faster
with its 380hp
| Lycs. With a stated cost of $767k for the Duke with
new -21 engines it
| sounds like that a pretty cheap way to go fast
(everything's relative,
| right?)
|
| Wooly
|