There are some very supportive pilots of the MU2. While I know there is nothing wrong with the plane itself, I do wonder why it has a reputation that scares many people away from it.
It got a bad reputation from a lot of accidents early on its career, then through training the stats improved. But what is the exact issue that gets people in trouble in that plane?

Rgs,

Patrick.

There’s an exhaustive thread or two here on BT about it.

Check out the PC-12 vs MU-2 threads.


Murray

Designed to go fast with best available engines of the day. Result was small wing and high loading. Needed to be able slow down adequately for approach and landing at small unimproved strips. Result was spoilers for roll and full span laps to enlarge wing, a lot. Needed to be beefy for unimproved strips. Result - overbuilt more weight for small wing.

Every other twin requires pilot to completely cleanup the plane when an engine fails after take off. In the MU2 this will kill you. Get the gear up, center the ball, trim and eat a banana. THEN feather the prop, retract flaps on schedule as airspeed increases.

There is no more magic or mystery. It'll do what you tell it to do but you do have tell it what to do.

It's early reputation was formed when it didn't take anything more than a MEL ticket to jump in and go, and many pilots weren't ready for a high performance environment without a bunch more training. Required training really has solved the problem, for the most part. That's not to say zero accidents, but it is basically comparable or better than everything else in that class of airplane.

Answer to question in post title: nothing

Go fly one yourself then judge. The peanut gallery is large and many opinions do not match the reality of the plane. If you happen to be near Denver anytime soon, ping me and we can go fly it.

Clearly I am biased, b/c within hours of flying one I was shopping for one

Raising the gear is the largest part of "cleaning the plane up".

Raising the gear is the largest part of "cleaning the plane up".

I just figured it out!! Here's what's wrong with he MU2!

It only does 208knots over the ground into a 65knot headwind!

Bingo, like most aircraft that have a "reputation" it came down to proper pilot training.

AG

I just figured it out!! Here's what's wrong with he MU2!

It only does 208knots over the ground into a 65knot headwind!

FL180.

I went to FL240 and was staring at 80-85knots on the nose. Couldn't do it...

I've done the same thing before, and then you expect better lower but it doesn't get much better, and you are burning more fuel... never in risk of not having enough to get to the destination or anything, but then you second guess the descent. The flexibility of the turboprop to just go lower to take advantage of the weaker winds, seems to me like an overrated possibility...
edit: James, you have about the best bang for the buck of anybody on BT, other than me
It's a bit subjective, right... look at Tarver with his budget Citation...

The rule of thumb I have used is the wind gradient needs to be greater than 4kts/1000’ to consider going lower in the FLs. It rarely is to pickup anything in range. If you have lots of fuel to burn you may get there a few minutes sooner.

The rule of thumb I have used is the wind gradient needs to be greater than 4kts/1000’ to consider going lower in the FLs. It rarely is to pickup anything in range. If you have lots of fuel to burn you may get there a few minutes sooner.

That ones useful.

When flight planning, I use a cost based estimate - every minute of time saved on the airframe is worth 10lbs of fuel. So if I gain 3 minutes at a lower altitude, I’m willing to burn 30 lbs more fuel to do it. That is a roughly constant cost trade off - a minute of airframe time is around $5 (round numbers) and a gallon and a half of fuel is roughly the same.

Of course sometimes you just say screw it and burn the fuel because we don’t buy airplanes to go slow...