Page 30 - Volume 13 Number 9

Inside of the flap gearbox or transmission showing worm and worm gears.
Raisbeck Engineering King Air STCs that existed at that time. We met James Raisbeck in Europe and used the airplane, prior to arriving in Paris, for some demonstration flights. A number of these flights were in Norway. Landing on some relatively short strips perched on the walls of fjords was lots of fun and certainly showed the airplane to be exceedingly capable. Upon landing for an overnight stay in Bergen our flaps did not retract.
No CBs were popped and no burned-up-flap-motor odor had been detected. I wiggled the Up limit switch and it seemed normal. Maybe split flap protection problem? In our travel kit we had a small jumper wire with alligator clips on both ends. I jumpered around the left switch – easily accessible since the flaps were down – and tried retraction again: Nothing. Moved to the right side: Success! I took off one of the Control circuit wires going to the switch and screwed it on to the other switch terminal, completing a circuit that bypassed the switch completely. Legal? Of course not. A work-around to complete the mission? Yes. I will also add this: For the rest of that entire series of flights, until we safely arrived back in the States, I was always occupying a cockpit seat and watching the flaps carefully whenever they operated. Had any roll tendency developed I would have been a rather fast-acting human split flap protector! When I bid farewell to the owner-pilot I emphasized that now he should have his shop find and fix the actual switch problem. It was time to retire the “temporary” work-around.
A little over a year later I was pre- flighting this same airplane during a recurrent training session. You guessed it: The switch was still bypassed. We did not fly until it got fixed. In another episode that I included in The King Air Book, I came across a 200 that was totally missing split flap protection switches on both sides. They were simply not there and the wires were screwed together to bypass them. By
28 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
SEPTEMBER 2019