Pardon me, yes I meant Meridian is cheaper. That's why I'm saying they're not really comparable. The TMB kills it, but it's substantially more money.
Ahhh the everlasting which is safer debate; twin or single? It will forever and for always be argued either way. In a twin you have double the chance of an engine failure, in the most critical part of flight (takeoff and landing) unless you're above blue line that twin is actually a single, etc. Personally I wouldn't have a problem riding behind a single turbine (eg: PC12), as my friend used to say "that's what the cowling's for; so the engine doesn't know it's over water".
G-IIs and IIBs are dirt cheap acquisitions. As you correctly identify the operational costs are BIG. My numbers are way old but figure at least $1.5M per year operational costs; no capital cost. Jeff
My favorite twin quote: Piston twins are great, when one engine fails the other will take you to the crash site...
All the peace I need is found at the Federal Aviation Administration...their studies indicate that piston engines in aircraft have a failure rate, on average, of one every 3,200 flight hours while turbine engines have a failure rate of one per 375,000 flight hours. Accordingly, for every turbine engine experiencing a failure, 117 piston engines will have failed...having been through a couple I can tell you it gets very quiet
A good friend of mine did an analysis for the air ambulance company where he was Chief Pilot. The data was clear-- the single engine turbines were at least as safe, if not safer, than the twins. The real difference was between single pilot and two pilot operations-- two pilot was much safer. But, again, statistucs don't matter to me on a dark and stormy night over the mountains.
The comments regarding single versus multi engine failure modes bring to mind Charles Lindbergh choice of flying the Atlantic with one engine instead of a couple. "It lessens the chance of one of them quitting." He seemed to have had a pretty good grip on the old probability syndrome. I recall the engineers on the 727 setting up the triple redundant systems on the airplane and stopped at three because any more would have killed the reliability ratio. They were right on, too, because that airplane set the standards for reliability in the 60's even with the super high lift system in the wings that one airline pilot told me, " You guys will never get all that stuff to work." It did and still does on the 747. Switches
