Page 26 - Volume 13 Number 4

missed approach or a VFR Balked Landing, “Power, Props, Flaps and Gear” is a great procedural memory jogger. An emergency descent uses the same four steps, albeit with some different actions.
Let me tell you of an event I observed in which a perfectly good engine was shut down by mistake. One of my King Air recurrent training students – an experienced, capable pilot – was flying “under the hood” during our recurrent flight training session. I asked him to pretend that we were encountering icing conditions so he turned on all of the ice protection items. I pulled the left condition lever into fuel cutoff and after a couple of seconds pushed it back up to low idle. Since auto-ignition was armed and hence the ignitors had started sparking as torque went below 400 ft-lbs, the engine did a lovely windmilling relight and was spooling up to normal operation. As soon as the sudden loss of power was felt, the pilot began by doing The Drill. Both power levers got advanced, both prop levers went full forward, and the flaps and gear were verified up. Meanwhile, the left engine had returned to normal operation, matched with the right. The pilot was still pushing quite hard on the right rudder pedal and the skid ball was well to the left.
I am sure some will accuse me of doing a “dirty trick” and certainly I realize that the pressures of flying on instruments during recurrent training – when you know bad things are going to happen because of that evil instructor beside you! – are a huge factor. Nevertheless, forgetting to extend the ice vanes in icing conditions could lead to ice ingestion causing a flameout followed by a relight. That is what I had tried to replicate here.
In the student’s mind, having felt the sudden loss in power, he “knew” that I had given him an engine failure and he proceeded with the rest of The Drill’s steps: Identify, Verify, Feather. Identify? There was no dead engine now but
24 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
APRIL 2019