Page 16 - Volume 14 Number 10

Your Most Dangerous Flight
You Must Trust but Verify
Over the last several years of watching King Air pilots in both their aircraft and in the simulator, it is obvious that they typically have developed their own cockpit flows and use of checklists. As Tom Clements has outlined time and time again, when you are new to flying a King Air, the checklist should be a “Do-List.” The difference between a Do-List and a checklist is the Do-List is a step-by-step guide you should complete each and every time you fly. On the other hand, a checklist is a list of items that are done as a “check” or verify list. Over time, each pilot develops their own flow patterns and use the checklists in their own way. Some read them aloud, some look and verify, some breeze through them much too quickly and others use them to block the sun from the side windows or windshield.
Tom has an article titled “Looking Isn’t Seeing” in which he discusses the phenomenon referred to as expectation bias. Many times during an instruction flight, he has pulled an engine gauge circuit breaker causing the gauge to drop to a zero reading, yet when the student reads the checklist and looks at the gauge they fail to notice the abnormality. Why is this? Because they see what they expect the gauge to read, not what their eyes are actually reading. Tom says there are two main reasons for this: (1) Going too fast and (2) A lack of judicious suspicion.
Your Most Dangerous Flight
Some would argue that every flight should be viewed as your most dangerous flight. However, from too many
14 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
by Kevin Carson (with excerpts from Tom Clements)
recent King Air accidents there seems to be an all too common theme – it just came out of maintenance. No maintenance personnel wants to deliver an aircraft that is not airworthy and no pilot wants to feel like a test pilot on the first flight.
Most pilots are not A&Ps and most A&Ps are not pilots. How do we get each of the two disciplines to understand the other? The Phase inspections, calendar items and cycle items on a King Air maintenance schedule are very detailed and take a considerable amount of time to complete; some are very invasive to the aircraft.
Maintenance providers are liable for their work and most are very diligent about how they perform the tasks and how it is documented in the aircraft log books. They want it to be correct the first time, every time.
So why is your first flight out of maintenance your most dangerous flight?
If you stood and watched how much tedious work is required in your Phase inspections, engine or prop overhauls and avionics upgrades and how much of the aircraft was disassembled, inspected and reassembled, it is an amazing amount of labor (as referred to in more detail in Dean Benedict’s article on page 22). To verify their work, technicians perform various checks, ground runs, and in some larger shops they have a final inspector verify the work ... but all too often there is no test flight.
Maintenance technicians do everything in their power
to provide a safe, airworthy aircraft. However, to perform all the tasks required for maintenance they must make significant changes to the aircraft that we, as pilots, must verify are back to “normal” prior to any flight. We all ›
OCTOBER 2020