Page 14 - Volume 12, Number 7

Ask the Expert
“War Stories”
by Tom Clements
The dictionary definition of War Story is “... an account or anecdote concerning one’s personal experiences, especially in military combat ...” The stories presented in this article surely come from my personal experience but I am thankful that they do not originate from military combat. Instead, they come from events in my 46 years of being involved with King Airs. I hope you will find them entertaining and, in some cases, enlightening.
E90 Paint Schemes
In addition to the standard paint designs that usually changed with each new model year, a King Air customer could direct the Beech paint shop to paint in whatever colors and designs that he or she wished. As factory flight instructors, it went without saying that we were told never to cast a disparaging remark on the paint ... even though it may be astonishingly ugly.
That was the case one morning when I walked out onto the Beechcraft Delivery Center’s parking ramp with the pilot who flew for a California-based E90 buyer. He had finished the ground training portion of our initial E90 course and now was starting the flying phase. Holy moly! What is this my eyes behold?! The airplane’s base coat was bright orange and the stripes were green! “Well,” I thought to myself, “it surely makes it easy to see for traffic avoidance purposes even though it’s as ugly as sin!”
Later that day, probably over lunch, the pilot mentioned the unusual paint scheme and volunteered the information about why his boss ordered it. This gentleman was a grower in California’s Central Valley and had made most of his money by growing and selling cantaloupe and lettuce. It was those two commodities that were being honored by the new King Air’s paint.
There is another E90 paint story that is even more unusual. I had walked down to the delivery center’s parking line on another morning, again with a student picking up a new King Air after his factory training was complete. I casually glanced at the other King Airs we walked past on our way to the one we would be flying. This was the student’s first King Air flight so we took the time to conduct a very thorough cockpit and exterior preflight inspection with time to handle all of the necessary instructions, explanations, and answers to the client’s questions. An hour or more had elapsed and so, before cranking up the engines, we decided to walk back to the delivery center for a “bio break.”
12 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
As we again passed the parked King Airs awaiting delivery I thought, “That’s strange. Here is a different E90 parked in the line yet I don’t recall hearing or seeing a Beech tug move the other one and replace it with this one.”
I stopped directly in front of the plane and was shocked to discover that it was the same E90 that I had seen earlier. The right side and the left side had totally different colors and stripe designs! They were standard factory designs, but different, side-to-side. We continued into the delivery center and I asked one of my colleagues there about this strange sight.
The buyer and his wife, as was typical, had visited the factory with their King Air salesperson to select all of the various options, including paint and interior specifications. The couple could not agree on colors and the disagreement escalated into a shouting match that ended with “OK, you can have your side and I’ll have mine!” They must never have reached a compromise since the finished product indeed came out with two totally different sides. As we returned to the airplane we were to fly, chuckling, I thought I should have looked inside this strange E90 to see if the interior, too, had “his and her” sides! I am not sure if I merely forgot to do so or was too scared of what I might find.
How Not to Feather a Propeller
It was late 1972, my first year as a ground and flight instructor for Beech Aircraft Corporation, and I was conducting transition training for a pilot whose Midwest- based company was moving up from a 1966 A90 into a new 1972 C90. The two airplanes were, of course, very similar but had a few differences. Two of the most significant differences were (1) the C90 flew quite a bit differently than the A90 due to longer wings and balanced flight controls, and (2) the C90 had two bleed air sources for cabin air inflow instead of the single supercharger of the A90. Compared to the A90 – not a bad flying machine in its own right – the C90 felt like it had power steering ... much lighter and faster-acting ailerons. (These balanced controls started with the B90 that was produced in the 1968 to 1971 model years.)
I anticipated that the pilot would find the move to the C90 enjoyable and easy, based on his previous A90 experience. That proved to be true; he was a very good pilot.
Part of our initial flight training syllabus included a balked landing with an engine failure just as go-around
JULY 2018