Hi, everyone. I am currently in Dubai, UAE and planning my return to the USA around this time in 2021. Part of planning my return is also to pick up my love of GA where I left off.

Before moving to the Middle East I owned a Piper Twin Comanche and have an ATP. While I loved my Twin Comanche finding parts was leaving me AOG more than I liked. The second engine was nice, but operationally Vmc and balanced field length requirements (not a consideration in a single!) limited my personal safe runway length to 3000' or longer. With the low prop clearance of the Twin Comanche I never dared to land on anything other than tarmac.

I used to rent a Bonanza S35 and evaluated buying one when I bought the Twin Comanche...at the time I wanted a fistfull of throttles so ended up with the Twin Comanche. I won't make that mistake again.

And that is the reason for joining; I want to re-acquaint myself with the Bonanza family and choose the right airplane for my needs. Ideally I will purchase it in the next six months and then leave six months for modest improvements and maintenance.

I start of this journey looking for a P- or later model, and am particularly curious about the V35TC which seems to offer remarkable performance. What are the benefits and drawbacks of each?

Looking forward to chatting!

Hi Brian,

just one thought on your comment above - if you aren't considering balanced field for the bonanza then why worry about it for the twin comanche ? I used to take our travel air in and out of our ~1800ft grass farm strip all the time. It would go anywhere a stock 182 could go.

Fair point. The Twin Comanche was my first owned twin and I flew it with kid gloves, especially when I had passengers aboard. Lovely handling airplane. It was either broken or breaking.

Most of my flying is in 200 series Cessna (C206/210/208) and a lot of it on short and unimproved strips. I have flown a Travelair and would definitely fly it to runways I would never take the Twin Comanche to; Travelair has the better landing gear and I think also better prop clearance. I had the small nose wheel STC which of course was a factor as well.

Bonanzas are great. I have a V35 with an IO550, it runs 172 ktas lean of peak on 13 gph. Room for the family with a good baggage compartment. Parts have not been a problem although I had the ruddervators reskinned in 2016 before the current multiyear outage where you can’t get new skins. Great Plane for a family with 2 young kids. CG becomes limited with 4 big people and luggage.

Your S model was the first with the bigger baggage area. That is a big deal for me. The big 74 gallon fuel system is simple and easy. Older planes needed more tanks to get that much fuel.

Bill Compton has had great success with his V35TC, some others have aftermarket turbonormalized kits that have more modern engineering, intercoolers, better compression ratios, etc. For me the regular 550 has good performance and my family doesn’t want to wear cannulas all the time.

Get the free Bonanza Performance App from POHPERFORMANCE to work out loading and performance scenarios.

Hi Brian, welcome to BT. Take your time looking at airplanes. So much to choose from out there.