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The Beechcraft Model 34 Twin-Quad was a prototype airliner designed and built by Beechcraft (now the Beechcraft division of Hawker Beechcraft) in the period between World War Two and the Korean War [1] . At this time many aircraft manufacturers in the United States anticipated a boom in civil aviation and a large number of designs left the drawing board only to ultimately fail. The Twin-Quad was one of these failures, partly because of its unusual design, and partly because of the thousands of ex-military transport aircraft that were available at the time for a fraction of the price of a new aircraft.
[edit] Design and Development
The design was a four-engine high-wing monoplane with tricycle undercarriage, sized for twenty passengers[1]. The unusual aspects of the design were the engine layout and the tail. The four engines were buried in the wings, with each pair of engines connected to a single propeller via clutches and a common gear box[1]. The engines were horizontally opposed eight cylinder air-cooled Lycoming GSO-580s[1] (GSO denoting Geared Supercharged and Opposed, with each engine featuring a built-in reduction gear box in addition to the common propeller gear box). The engines were rated at 400 horsepower at 3,300 rpm. The tail was unusual because unlike the vertical and two horizontal surfaces found on most aircraft, the Twin-Quad's was a two-surface V-tail similar to the tail fitted to Beechcraft's other new product at the time, the Model 35 Bonanza[1].
Another, but more conventional, design aspect was the belly being made strong enough to sustain minimal damage in the event of a "wheels-up" landing[1]. The wing measured 70 ft from tip to tip and the fuselage was 53 ft long[2]; with the top of the V-tail almost 18 ft above the ground and a design Maximum Take Off Weight (MTOW) of 20,000 lbs[1], the Twin-Quad is to date the largest and heaviest Beechcraft civil design[3], with only the smaller XA-38 Grizzly military aircraft outweighing it.
[edit] Operational History
The Twin-Quad took to the air for the first time on 1 October 1947, with V. L. Cartsens at the controls[4]. The reinforced belly was validated in an inadvertent wheels-up landing[1] during flight testing. The aircraft had accumulated more than 200 hours of test flying when it was damaged beyond repair in a forced landing shortly after taking off on 17 January 1949[1]. The aircraft could not compete with the thousands of less-complex and cheaper war-surplus transports such as the larger C-47 Skytrain, the similarly-sized C-60 Lodestar and Beechcraft's own smaller C-45 Expediter; it had attracted no orders and the project was terminated.
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