Photos by Clint Goff
Type “stupid pet tricks” in your search engine and you’ll be inundated with videos of obsessively cute animals doing some of the dumbest acts that humans have dreamt up. Fortunately, these stupid tricks are entertaining and safe. No one gets hurt, so we smile and go on with life.
Doing “stupid” in your King Air, though, is not entertaining. It could cost you gobs in downtime and dollars, and although usually not fatal, some of these acts are often committed on the path to a much more serious accident. I see some of these moves frequently as I move about in the King Air world, and they are no joke.
With a tip of the hat to late night legend David Letterman – known for his Stupid Pet Tricks, Stupid Human Tricks and Top 10 segments – I’ve compiled this list of stupid things you can do in your King Air to cause you downtime, create embarrassment and empty your wallet.
No. 10: Don’t close the door properly
We operate three King Airs for clients. Two clients know how to close the door properly. Since Texas is hot nine months a year, these passengers let the pilots perform cockpit checks before boarding and closing the door. This allows some airflow in the cabin, which is heavily influenced by the greenhouse effect.
It’s possible to close the door but not latch the handle properly. The key is to ensure the CABIN DOOR light is not illuminated. I usually look at that red light when I hear the passengers boarding and I watch the light go out to be sure the door is closed properly.
We once used our King Air for a humanitarian mission to the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian destroyed Marsh Harbour and surrounding cays. The pilot was trusted, but he failed to watch the light. They’d land at an island, feather the left engine, open the door, disembark some passengers, load others, close the door and fly to the next island. This was a hectic mission with many logistical moves, which can allow for error to creep in the door (pun intended).
Instead of shutting down the airplane and moving to the back to open and close the door, the pilot gave a quick brief on door operation to one passenger, who then opened and closed the door after each landing.
The passenger didn’t close the door properly, the pilot didn’t check the CABIN DOOR light and the door opened on takeoff at about 300 feet AGL. The door flew off the airplane – held on only by the cable – and thrashed the lower skin of the fuselage. There were bumps and bruises on the bottom of the airplane, but the biggest problem was a puncture in the pressure vessel shaped like the door handle.
The mission was canceled, and the airplane limped home after a lot of effort. It was down for two months for repairs and it now had damage history. The bottom line? Check the CABIN DOOR light on every flight!
No. 9: Forget to preflight the knife
The knife is the flat blade with a handle between the basin and the reservoir of the potty. It keeps the blue water in the reservoir during turbulence and keeps waste in the toilet bowl from entering the reservoir.
Every King Air pilot must ensure the knife is in the correct position before each flight. If left closed, passengers using the potty during flight can lead to waste spilling beyond the basin. Once flying, you’ll have no chance to open the knife and explaining to passengers how it functions can be difficult.
If the knife is open and you encounter turbulence, the contents of the reservoir will jostle out and the blue water conditioner will stain the carpet. This is a good time to review the “Law of 6 Ps,” an old Army term that applies to this discussion: “Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.”
No. 8: Bump the floor lighting switch
There is a switch in the back of your King Air, near the floor, that turns on the aft light – a small light illuminating the door entry. I bet 50% of King Air pilots don’t even know that switch exists and most are certainly not postflighting that switch.
The switch is powered by the battery bus and is therefore connected directly to the battery. If it is left on, you might return to an airplane with dead or seriously depleted batteries. It is so easy to accidentally kick that switch when entering/leaving the airplane or when removing baggage.
You’re postflighting your King Air, right? In the Army (I flew Blackhawk and Apache helicopters), we were more adamant about a postflight than a preflight. While preflights are important, postflights allow you time to address issues before the next flight. Finding those problems early is key and a postflight takes only a few minutes. Look for the lighting switch in the back of your airplane during the postflight.
No. 7: Don’t guard the CLs when entering or leaving the cockpit
Thankfully we don’t see this often in the accident record, but it bears reminding the pilot that the condition lever(s) will shut down the engine. It is so easy for a pant leg, headset cord, coat hem or just about anything to get tangled with a condition lever. It is so easy to simply put your hand behind the entire power quadrant when someone leaves or enters the copilot seat. That hand signals to the exiting occupant that you are watching, and you’ll have the chance to save the day rapidly if something gets hung up in the exit. This same philosophy applies to guarding other levers and switches in the cockpit.
No. 6: Don’t chock your airplane
You might think this doesn’t need to be said but it does.We have a jar at Casey Aviation that receives $5 fines when we witness “safety violations.” Don’t chock an airplane and one of us spots it? Pay five bucks. Don’t install the pitot covers after a flight and someone on our team notices? Pay up. It’s a fun way to instill a safety culture at our hangars, and that jar is always getting filled.
Our focus on chocking at Casey Aviation started when an airplane rolled back from a parking spot into the grass. Nothing was hurt and we got it out easily but knowing it could have been worse pushed me to bolt 20-foot angle iron into the ground behind those tiedown spots (three aircraft have benefitted from the iron over the years).
I bought 20 rope chocks from McFarlane Aviation (mcfarlaneaviation.com) that I highly recommend for ease of use. We’ve reduced inadvertent rolling of aircraft to zero in the last two years with our “culture of chocking.” You should develop the same culture in your aviation operations.
No. 5: Don’t validate your autopilot modes
I can’t tell you how many times I hear pilots in recurrent training ask, “What’s it doing now?” They’re referring to the autopilot. When they have no clue what it is doing, they turn off the autopilot and hand fly, moving farther behind the airplane.
The simple solution is to look at the scoreboard, the small area of panel real estate that advises what the autopilot is doing. Being able to read that scoreboard accurately is critical to safety. I witness pilots who don’t know the modes for roll and pitch and don’t know the default modes for either. They focus more on wondering what the autopilot is doing than on situational awareness, and their flying suffers.
With so many new panels in King Air aircraft you must spend time learning new technologies, and when you tell your autopilot what to do, validate what it is actually doing by looking at the scoreboard.
No. 4: Don’t perform a quality post-maintenance test flight
I’m a designated pilot examiner in the North Texas FAA Flight Standards District Office. We recently reviewed aircraft accident statistics at an annual meeting of the DPEs. The data showed a large uptick in accidents due to poor maintenance.
Aviation faces a shortage of maintenance technicians. The younger generation isn’t interested in aviation maintenance careers, causing a global issue that trickles down to individual owner-operators. As an aviation maintenance facility owner, I can testify that hiring quality personnel is our top challenge. We’ve been successful in hiring incredible talent and potential talent, but it’s difficult.
Treat your maintainers well, realizing it is hard to be a mechanic nowadays. Know that shops are understaffed and overworked, so stack the deck in your favor after a maintenance event. Do thorough preflights when you pick up your airplane after maintenance as well as comprehensive post-maintenance test flights after phase inspections.
Plan for the test flight rather than just hoping everything is OK. Pick up your airplane in the morning so there’s time to fix small items that will undoubtedly surface. You can even pay the maintenance facility to have that test flight conducted prior to your arrival.
No. 3: Push the life of your tires
Tires take an incredible beating due to hard landings, crosswind takeoffs and landings, improper inflation and disuse. While tires are designed for this abuse, generally speaking we do not replace tires soon enough.
The mindset of a usual King Air pilot is, “They’ve got a few more landings in them!” I see efficiency prioritized over safety. If you have a bald spot, change that tire. If you are showing tread, change that tire. If you have allowed the air pressure to get so low and sit so long that the tire is permanently damaged, change that tire.
This is especially true of the main landing gear tires on the dual-trunnion models of the King Air, where the outside tire absorbs all the energy in a properly flown crosswind landing. You should be landing wing-low in a crosswind, and almost every landing you experience has some sort of crosswind.
Tires endure immense abuse while holding side loads, keeping the props off the ground and dealing with your ham-footedness during ground operations. A blown nose tire can cause downtime, delayed or cancelled flights and embarrassment. A King Air with a suddenly deflated tire can be a handful on landing.
The bottom line? Don’t be cheap when it comes to tires. I’ll fly to that out-of-the-way airport to buy cheap fuel, but I won’t be cheap with tires. They are too important to operational safety.
No. 2: Ride the brakes on landing (or takeoff)
If you have a bald spot on your tire, it’s your fault and it should shock you into realizing you’re not as good as you thought.
I’ve said to many training clients: “Your feet are on the brakes!” One trainee responded that he was not on the brakes and that I was too serious of an instructor. I fumed in the right seat, and when he landed, both main tires deflated instantly. He had landed with his feet on the brakes, balding the tires and popping them. It was everything I could do not to say, “I told you so!”
The airport’s maintenance facility had the airplane off the runway in less than an hour and new tires installed in less than four hours. The pilot was embarrassed and never contacted me again. That incident showed a bad attitude and bad flight skills.
The balls of your feet must be on the bottom pad of the rudder pedals during takeoff and landing. After you land and begin to slow down, then move your feet up on the rudder pedals to stop the airplane. Rookies land with their feet on the brakes.
And the No. 1 Stupid King Air trick is (insert drumroll): Use excessive reverse
Newbies to the King Air world love reverse. Most of them move up from an airplane that didn’t have reverse, and it’s fun to land, throw the props into reverse and feel the “whoa boy!” However, it can cost you dearly.
When you land and move the props into reverse, you throw any loose debris from the landing surface out in front of the airplane. Your engines ingest those foreign objects. Your Ng will probably be spinning at over 30,000 rpm and turning at the speed of sound. If that pebble jumps into your inlet, somehow passes the squirrel cage and plops into the first stage of axial flow compression, all hell will break loose in the form of scratching, marring or denting the compressor blades, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, the pebble will continue its destructive path downstream into the engine and you’ll have a six-digit problem.
The damage probably won’t be immediately apparent, as the PT6 operates well after being injured. Your next borescope inspection will reveal the damage.
At our maintenance facility we frequently see FOD (foreign object damage). One event we experienced showcases the consequences of FOD. The engine ran great, with ITT, TQ and performance numbers much like the other undamaged engine. But the borescope pictures showed an engine that had one blade on the first stage with a huge conical shape cut out of two blades. The second-stage blades also had damage. The engine had to be removed to be sent to an engine shop where it took more than $250,000 to repair – a huge price to pay for one pebble.
The pilot didn’t know where he picked up the FOD. It is hard to know for sure, but my bet is he used reverse too much, too frequently, too harshly.
Here’s a tip: Don’t try to turn off at the midfield taxiway and don’t use reverse at all on your normal landings. Let the airplane roll to the end of the runway and hardly touch the brakes. It’d be nice if you had to add power to get off the runway. If you watch the pros, that’s what they do and you’ll hardly ever see a King Air pro drive the props into reverse. Put that into your program to avoid FOD incidents.
I hope my Top 10 Stupid King Air Tricks provides thoughts on how you can better operate your King Air. The words “stupid” and “King Air” should never be a part of anyone’s vocabulary when they think of your flying.