Beechcraft Travel Air

The Beechcraft Travel Air is a twin-engine development of the Beechcraft Bonanza, designed to fill the gap between the single-engine Model 35 Bonanza and the much larger Model 50 Twin Bonanza, and it ultimately served as the basis for its replacement, the Baron. Developed as the Badger to compete with the Cessna 310 and the Piper Apache, it took its basic design from the Bonanza, its vertical stabilizer from the T-34 Mentor, its wing spar from the Twin Bonanza and its landing gear from the United States Navy Mentor, and it used two four-cylinder Lycoming engines. A 1956 letter from the United States Air Force said that Badger was already the reporting name of the Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 bomber, so Beechcraft reused the Travel Air name of its predecessor company. The model run lasted ten years, from 1958 to 1968, with four distinct variants.