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lateral and directional control when one engine is suddenly rendered inoperative. Intentional failing of one engine below this speed is not recommended.”
This “V speed” was not defined until sometime in the 1970s. It came in response to the distressing number of multi-engine training accidents that were forthcoming from VMCA demonstrations. As instructors, it makes sense to never give a student an engine failure while too close to loss of control speed!
If I were the one to have written Beech’s “Practice Demonstration of VMCA” procedure, I would have made two changes ... for the better, I hope. First, in the “Note” portion, reducing power to idle is the correct response when VMCA is encountered. (And as I have presented, that never happens during this demonstration!) But for a stall recovery all we need to do is reduce the angle of attack by lowering the nose. A lot of unnecessary and undesirable loss of altitude will be experienced if power is retarded during the stall recovery, especially all the way to idle. I would suggest that leaving power alone on the good engine and simply lowering the nose to increase airspeed would be the better, safer procedure.
Second, again in the “Note” portion of the procedure, I would add “or above” after “lower the nose to regain VSSE.” Wouldn’t we almost always want more than just this very low speed as the demonstration is terminated? Of
course. Additionally, I will mention that I usually start the demonstration at an airspeed of about 120 KIAS, near blue line. That complies with the “Above 104 knots (VSSE)” yet provides more time to ease into the maneuver.
You will notice that use of trim is not mentioned in the procedure. The comment about reducing airspeed by “approximately 1 knot per second” can only be accomplished by raising the nose gradually and climbing since maximum allowable power remains on the “good” engine. It is common and correct to use pitch trim to compensate for the changing elevator force as speed is reduced.
But what about rudder trim? Since it is not addressed, one could argue that you can “Do whatever you want.” On the other hand, since encountering true VMCA during normal flying almost always would involve an unexpected engine loss of power with little reaction time, I request that no rudder trim input be made. That allows the student to experience as great of a rudder force as he/she will ever be required to give. Hard? Sure! Manageable? Quite easily!
If your particular King Air model is equipped with the rudder boost system, it will be operative during the VMCA demonstration. In the case of the 300-series, in which the system varies the rudder force applied based on the difference in engine power, you will be receiving
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JULY 2021
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 21