tonycondon
Gastons CRO (Chief Dinner Reservation Officer)
Last year at the local CAF's silent auction fundraiser I bought 2 1/2 hr demo rides in a King Air simulator at Flight Safety here in town. One of the instructors there is in the wing so we finally decided to get me in the sim. I had a blast!
First off its been a while since I flew a twin, last June at Gaston's when Ted and I took the Aztec water skiing. I've never flown a king air or any other turbo prop for that matter and ive never flown any type of flight simulator besides MSFS and XPlane.
I spent a fair amount of time having Mike go through the cockpit layout with me so i could find where important switches and levers were at. The sim had the Proline avionics and I was mostly lost as far as that was concerned although I could get the basic info from it. I blasted off down the runway at Wichita, keeping it mostly straight and lifted off and just did some flying around with some steep turns and a stall. We had set up the FMS for an ILS so I used the needles to help me out with the first landing. I managed to get it on the ground without breaking anything.
Took off again and climbed up. With 3 or 4000 feet under me Mike killed an engine. We had briefly talked about the procedure. Fuel to cutoff, Props feather, and some switch on the fuel panel to off. So I did all that. lost some altitude but i had a lot under me and I was impressed with how well it climbed. Fired that engine back up and then he gave me another one. I think this one was not a true engine failure but some sort of fuel delivery issue. basically the engine was running but not much power was getting to the prop. Drill was to feather the prop but leave the engine running so that the generator and whatnot still worked. Trick for the real students was to fail the opposite generator at about the same time they killed the not really failed engine.
next takeoff I had an engine failure shortly after gear up but after blue line and a hundred or two feet in the air. I went through identify, verify, feather and whatnot and climbed away. instructor is like "you know you have autofeather, right?" oh yea...I circled around and made a decent single engine landing.
Next time around I got another engine failure but did the thing you are supposed to do, which is nothing. what a novel concept. The engine autofeathered and I climbed away with much less wallowing about or stress than the time before. nifty!
I think the time after that He gave me a failure right about the time I was going to lift off. I think V1 was something like 93 and Blue line is up around 108, at least according to the checklist. Well i had the failure, glanced at my airspeed, saw it was above V1 and started to continue. actually just barely lifted off but then i realized that i was taking off on a 10,000 ft runway so i just shut the throttles and stopped.
I think on one of the next single engine landings he threw in a burnt out light bulb for the landing gear. That is where I did the single engine go around. Worked out fine. I climbed out and then mike told me how there are three ways to verify the gear is actually down and lo and behold he had failed the light not the gear. so i landed.
one other takeoff was normal and then lights started flashing and one of them said hydraulic pressure low so i got to pump down the gear. i let Leah fly then because she had been enjoying the view and the show from the right seat. She did a nice job flying although her landing was a little rough. She was way out of trim and then the screen turned red. oh well.
So all in all it was a great time. We ended up getting 2 hours in the sim and I really enjoyed it. I've always wanted to see what that kind of training is like. Once I got used to how the airplane handled it was pretty easy to fly. I love the abilities for great emergency procedures training. I think that considering I knew absolutely nothing about the airplane walking in I think I did an OK job flying it. I just wish I could do more!
First off its been a while since I flew a twin, last June at Gaston's when Ted and I took the Aztec water skiing. I've never flown a king air or any other turbo prop for that matter and ive never flown any type of flight simulator besides MSFS and XPlane.
I spent a fair amount of time having Mike go through the cockpit layout with me so i could find where important switches and levers were at. The sim had the Proline avionics and I was mostly lost as far as that was concerned although I could get the basic info from it. I blasted off down the runway at Wichita, keeping it mostly straight and lifted off and just did some flying around with some steep turns and a stall. We had set up the FMS for an ILS so I used the needles to help me out with the first landing. I managed to get it on the ground without breaking anything.
Took off again and climbed up. With 3 or 4000 feet under me Mike killed an engine. We had briefly talked about the procedure. Fuel to cutoff, Props feather, and some switch on the fuel panel to off. So I did all that. lost some altitude but i had a lot under me and I was impressed with how well it climbed. Fired that engine back up and then he gave me another one. I think this one was not a true engine failure but some sort of fuel delivery issue. basically the engine was running but not much power was getting to the prop. Drill was to feather the prop but leave the engine running so that the generator and whatnot still worked. Trick for the real students was to fail the opposite generator at about the same time they killed the not really failed engine.
next takeoff I had an engine failure shortly after gear up but after blue line and a hundred or two feet in the air. I went through identify, verify, feather and whatnot and climbed away. instructor is like "you know you have autofeather, right?" oh yea...I circled around and made a decent single engine landing.
Next time around I got another engine failure but did the thing you are supposed to do, which is nothing. what a novel concept. The engine autofeathered and I climbed away with much less wallowing about or stress than the time before. nifty!
I think the time after that He gave me a failure right about the time I was going to lift off. I think V1 was something like 93 and Blue line is up around 108, at least according to the checklist. Well i had the failure, glanced at my airspeed, saw it was above V1 and started to continue. actually just barely lifted off but then i realized that i was taking off on a 10,000 ft runway so i just shut the throttles and stopped.
I think on one of the next single engine landings he threw in a burnt out light bulb for the landing gear. That is where I did the single engine go around. Worked out fine. I climbed out and then mike told me how there are three ways to verify the gear is actually down and lo and behold he had failed the light not the gear. so i landed.
one other takeoff was normal and then lights started flashing and one of them said hydraulic pressure low so i got to pump down the gear. i let Leah fly then because she had been enjoying the view and the show from the right seat. She did a nice job flying although her landing was a little rough. She was way out of trim and then the screen turned red. oh well.
So all in all it was a great time. We ended up getting 2 hours in the sim and I really enjoyed it. I've always wanted to see what that kind of training is like. Once I got used to how the airplane handled it was pretty easy to fly. I love the abilities for great emergency procedures training. I think that considering I knew absolutely nothing about the airplane walking in I think I did an OK job flying it. I just wish I could do more!
Just kidding! 
