Hot on the heels of the type’s delivery to the US Navy (USN) and selection for use by the Royal Canadian Air Force, Textron Aviation is giving a debut appearance to its Beechcraft King Air 260 trainer at the Farnborough air show.
A first two customer examples were delivered in late April in support of the USN’s Multi-Engine Training System (METS) requirement, following a contract signed in January 2023. Up to 64 will be fielded under the service designation T-54A, as replacements for veteran Beechcraft T-44Cs.
Based at NAS Corpus Christi in Texas, the METS fleet will be used to train to multi-engine pilots for the USN, US Marine Corps and US Coast Guard.
The company-owned King Air 260 displayed at Farnborough was employed during the development phase of the METS programme, and more recently supported the training of USN instructors prior to the T-54A entering use.
Its pressurised cockpit is configured with three crew seats: two for student pilots, plus an instructor pilot position. The METS configuration also includes a data acquisition and telemetry system with datalink, which enables real-time maintenance tracking. The recorded mission data, plus cockpit video, also support post-flight debriefing.
The trainer also has gained an angle-of-attack system with glareshield indicator – a first for a King Air – which Bob Gibbs, Textron Aviation’s vice-president, global sales and strategy, special missions, says enables students to learn how to better manage the aircraft’s energy during manoeuvres.
Another enhancement introduced for the METS fleet is an auto-throttle guard mode, which will prevent a student from manually positioning the throttle in a way to “over-torque or over-temp” the engines. “The software will wake up and nudge the throttles back, with a haptic feel for the pilot,” he explains.
Deliveries of the potentially 64-strong T-54A fleet will be completed by the second quarter of 2026.
Canada, meanwhile, will receive seven King Air 260s as part of its new Future Aircrew Training system, to be delivered from 2029 by CAE and KF Aerospace joint venture SkyAlyne.
Options to be incorporated into the Canadian examples will include the ability to use night-vision goggles, and an anti-ice braking system. “Moose Jaw [Saskatchewan] is a lot colder than Corpus Christi,” notes Gibbs.
He says the aircraft’s all-aluminium airframe is “very robust and very well adapted for low-level flying, which is important for the military training mission”, while the twin-turboprop configuration offers major benefits during instruction.
“It gives you asymmetrical thrust by being a turboprop with the engines on the wing,” he notes. “With most militaries, their transport pilots are going to be flying [Lockheed Martin] C-130s, [Airbus Defence & Space] A400Ms and C295s or [Leonardo C-27J] Spartans, so they need that experience.”
Regarding future sales prospects, Textron Aviation is “working with quite a few air forces”, he says, “that need either to add, or in a lot of cases replace old aircraft”.
Some military operators have used their King Air trainers for more than 40 years, Gibbs says, while noting that aged types such as the French armed forces’ Embraer EMB-121 Xingu trainers, increasingly face obsolescence issues.
“The new technology would really increase their training throughput,” he told FlightGlobal at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on 20 July, while also pointing to the long-term assurance provided by the METS deal.
“This is a 40-year programme, with 50 years of history of supporting the platform. There is also a supply chain guarantee: because of our US Navy contract, we will have parts for our multi-engine trainer for the lifetime of anyone that starts flying it.”
