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pilot was looking out the windshield or at the instruments intently when he moved his hand away from the power levers to reach for the landing gear handle and hence missed seeing the motion? I am convinced more than one fatal takeoff crash has resulted.
This is why I emphatically wish that The Drill were always the first four steps when a loss of power is suspected. If, after moving both power levers and both prop levers fully forward and making sure the flaps and gear are where you want them to be, we now still have an obvious lack of power, then proceed with the rest of The Drill ... the “Identify, Verify and Feather” steps.
The “Four Friends” that I have been discussing here in relation to a suspected power loss also lend themselves perfectly to three other King Air procedures. For an IFR 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
JANUARY 2023
The first four steps of The Drill.
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
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