High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Beechcraft Starship is a United States turboprop- powered six- to eight-passenger seat business aircraft. The design was originated by Beechcraft in January 1980 as Preliminary Design 330 (PD 330). Burt Rutan was subsequently retained to refine PD330 and one of the significant changes he instituted was the addition of variable geometry to the canard (he holds a patent for this). Rutan's California-based design and fabrication company Scaled Composites was then contracted to build scale-model prototypes to aid in development.