Page 21 - March 25

Joe Casey uses this diagram in training the power rollback.
unsurvivable or nearly unsurvivable.
But those accidents did not need to
happen. Had the pilot engaged the
MOR, the engine could have been
easily managed.
There is a gap in understanding
of a power rollback in the PA46 and
TBM communities. Sadly, I have
had pilots come to me for recurrent
training in their turbine airplanes
who have never touched the MOR.
How anyone could get through an
initial or recurrent training event
and NOT have flown their turbine
with the MOR is unfathomable to
me. Yet it happens.
Based on purely anecdotal
evidence from my decades of
training in the single-engine turbine
market, I believe the chances of a
power rollback as compared to an
engine failure to be a 10-1 ratio (I
don’t have exact numbers, and I
don’t think anyone else has accurate
numbers either). Said another way:
I believe a power rollback is 10
times more likely to happen than
an engine failure in PT6-powered
airplanes. Why? Most successfully
handled power rollback events are
not reported, and in the worst of
power rollback fatal crashes, the
engine is so mangled that the NTSB
cannot determine the cause of the
event. Many of the worst crashes are
simply reported, with “subsequent
power loss” as a contributing cause
to the accident. My point? Power
rollbacks do occur and are probably/
arguably the primary cause of “loss
of engine thrust” in a PT6 engine.
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DEAN BENEDICT A&P, AI, CONSULTANT
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We have a lot of work to do in the
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Tel: 702-524-4378 dr.dean@beechmedic.com
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PA46 community in teaching the
dangerous flight characteristics of
an airplane with a windmilling prop
and how to use a MOR if we are going
to improve the safety record in the
turbine PA46. I hope we can reverse
the present trend.
Here’s where this discussion
applies to the King Air community.
The King Air does not have a MOR,
but it has the same PT6 engine that
is susceptible to a power rollback.
Beechcraft (and the FAA) decided
that a multi-engine airplane does not
need a MOR because the offending
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MARCH 2025 KING AIR MAGAZINE •
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