Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner
twin turboprop airliner family
The Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner (previously the Swearingen Metro and later Fairchild Aerospace Metro) is a 19-seat, pressurized, twin-turboprop airliner first produced by Swearingen Aircraft and later by Fairchild Aircraft at a plant in San Antonio, Texas.
Design
The Metroliner was an evolution of the Swearingen Merlin turboprop-powered business aircraft. Ed Swearingen, a Texas fixed-base operator and aeronautical engineer, started the developments that led to the Metro through gradual modifications to the Beechcraft Twin Bonanza and Queen Air business aircraft, which he dubbed Excalibur.
A new fuselage (but with a similar nose) and vertical fin were then developed, married to salvaged and rebuilt (wet) Queen Air wings and horizontal tails, and Twin Bonanza landing gear; this became the SA26 Merlin, more or less a pressurized Excalibur. Through successive models (the SA26-T Merlin IIA and SA26-AT Merlin IIB) the engines were changed to Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6, then Garrett TPE331 turboprops. These were marketed as business aircraft seating eight to ten passengers.
An all-new aircraft was built and named the SA226-T Merlin III with a new nose, wings, landing gear, cruciform horizontal tail and inverted inlet Garrett engines. Ultimately a stretch of the Merlin III was designed, sized to seat 22 passengers and called the SA226-TC Metro. Because FAA regulations limited an airliner to no more than 19 seats if no flight attendant was to be carried, the aircraft was optimized for that number of passengers, with 4 feet and 9 inches of headroom within the passenger cabin. The standard engines offered were two TPE331-3UW turboprops driving three-bladed propellers.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.