The Starship line was put out to pasture in the mid 2000s. It's unclear just how much longer Starships anywhere will be flying, for the clock is inexorably ticking. Raytheon quietly bought back its Starships in the early 2000s, offering attractive terms and trade-up programs to the company's newer, modern jet aircraft. Only two or three are known to be flying at this time.
The Starship was finally, inevitably, doomed by economics—which seems to kill more planes today than traditional factors like reliability, safety or the end of a technology life cycle. While Starships were made to last forever, in that they were the first airframe with such advanced composite technology that their hulls literally didn't have decommission dates, there just weren't enough of the plane made for Raytheon to be able to justify keeping the line alive. A Raytheon spokesperson was quoted as saying "the costs of supporting the fleet are prohibitive. There are many parts on the Starship that are unique to that aircraft. We have a backlog of parts, and will part out those aircraft that are being decommissioned to add to that backlog." (Read Aviation Week & Space Technology's June 30th, 2003 article on the subject.)
Industry observers suggest the Starship fell victim to a confluence of factors. First, it was both a radical design breakthrough, and a radical manufacturing technology breakthrough - and while you can always improve one or the other, some in the business say messing with both at the same time can be a recipe for failure. Add to that the fact the sales and marketing divisions of Beech Aircraft, the original manufacturer, aggressively pre-sold the plane. So when production delays and FAA certification stretched years past original forecast delivery dates, demand began to wane. Customers eventually went elsewhere. It appeared the final screw in the coffin was the economic climate of the late 80s into which the Starship was finally introduced. An economic recession had taken hold in the U.S. Out of fiscal austerity, many of the corporate customers that'd actually wanted to buy Starships chose not to, for fear of shareholder criticism.
The radical design that Beech hoped would transform its company into a leading purveyor of personal and commercial transport aircraft of the future, a next-generation Boeing-type empire, was just too different. It was arguably the wrong thing (or maybe it genuinely WAS the right thing) at the wrong time.
The majority of the Starship fleet was gathered by Raytheon at the Pinal Air Park near Tucson in the mid 2000s. At least two were donated to museums [details of first, details of second]. Engines and some avionics were recovered. Some were disassembled for parts to support Starships still flying. But most were just flat out destroyed.
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