Let’s talk about your preflight routine. Did you know there are some simple tasks you can add to your preflight checklist that could ultimately save you thousands of dollars in maintenance costs? Your flaps are one example—do you check your flaps regularly? Remember the old adage: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of…
Recently, hot weather has been a top news story all over the United States. Areas that don’t normally see triple-digit temperatures have been getting a taste of what we deal with every summer in the desert Southwest. This got me thinking about an engine problem that can crop up when the OAT is scorching hot.…
Take a look at the wheel bearing in Figure 1 (below) – it’s dry as a bone – there’s not a speck of grease or lubrication to be found. It looks like it sat in a solvent tank for a month, then tossed on a junk pile. The crazy thing is this wheel bearing came…
Imagine you are pre-flighting your King Air, checking the oil and on one engine the oil is off the stick! What do you do? For many, the first instinct is to dump a couple quarts in that side and check the stick again. Just make sure you have plenty of rags in the aircraft because…
I’ve been corresponding with a King Air owner about an oil temp problem he has wrestled with for awhile. On one engine, the oil temp is not warming up to where it should be. Initially he worried about icing in the oil-to-fuel heater, but we have since ruled that out. This started my thinking about…
A director of maintenance from Alaska with several King Air B100s called me not long ago. The most recent addition to his fleet had a pressurization problem that would not resolve. The system tested fine on the ground, but there was no pressurization in the air. He had researched the part number of the flow…
I spend a lot of time researching logbooks on behalf of buyers considering King Airs for purchase. They need to know where the aircraft is maintenance-wise. Some of these King Airs are “younger” but many have 10,000 hours or more. The longevity of the Beechcraft King Air makes me proud, but 10,000 hours makes for…
I’ve been getting a few calls lately about “the wing AD.” King Air owners want to know: Do I have to do it? And if so, where should I go? They are referring to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Airworthiness Directive (AD) 91-12-10, which applies only to certain King Air B200s and 300 models that…
In recent months I’ve fielded quite a few calls on the autofeather system in King Airs. In one case I was engaged to assist a shop with unraveling an autofeather mystery. The system was inoperative on one side and they had taken every conceivable step to fix it, with no luck. As the tech outlined…
The polarized windows in a King Air were designed to block sunlight for passengers sitting on the sunny side of the cabin. They are the King Air’s answer to that little sliding shade found on airliners and elsewhere, and they do the trick nicely, but with one major drawback: They are prone to burning out…