Beechcraft King Air 260

About the Beechcraft King Air 260

The Beechcraft King Air 260 is the current-production version of the 200-series twin turboprop and the smaller sibling to the King Air 360. It seats up to seven passengers in a 16 ft 8 in square-oval cabin, cruises at 310 ktas and covers about 1,038 nm with four passengers aboard, and gets airborne in 2,111 ft, which puts short and high-elevation runways well within reach.

Who charters it

Strong for short-hop regional flying and for airports a jet simply cannot use. A 2,111 ft takeoff distance is shorter than almost anything else carrying six passengers in a pressurized cabin, two PT6A-52 engines give the redundancy that corporate travel policies often require, and hot-and-high performance out of Colorado and mountain-west strips is genuinely good. It is not the right aircraft for a comfort-first client or a long day. The cabin is 16 ft 8 in long with 57 in of headroom, so nobody stands up, baggage is capped at 550 lb and 55.3 cu ft, and at 310 ktas anything much past 700 nm starts to feel long next to a light jet. Hourly rates for this aircraft are estimate ranges for planning, not quotes.

Shares the King Air twin-PT6A architecture and needs even less runway than the 350i, just 2,111 ft at sea level, which keeps ASE and EGE straightforward for typical loads. No King Air 260-specific Telluride performance data turned up in this research, so treat TEX the same way as the 350i in principle: runway length is not the limiter, sustained climb through terrain up to 14,000 ft and summer density altitude are, but confirm actual TEX numbers against the AFM or the operator before quoting a hot-day, full-load trip. Twin-engine redundancy is the real edge this aircraft and the 350i hold over the single-engine turboprops in this dataset for box-canyon terrain.

Planning guidance only. The operator, the AFM performance data, and conditions on the day are the final authority.