SimuFlite’s level-C King Air 200 simulator can be transformed in a few hours from round instruments to a B200 model’s EFIS gear.|
Morning light was just beginning to illuminate the New York City skyline in soft shades of lilac and pale vermilion as I swung the King Air 200 onto John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Runway 31 Right. Cleared for takeoff, I asked my copilot to set the power as I held the brakes and kept an eye on the gauges. The airplane shuttered from the torque of its twin Pratt & Whitney PT6s as the engines came to life. I laid a hand atop the throttles, gripped the yoke perhaps a little too tightly with the other and set us loose down the 10,000-foot-long runway.
The speed quickly built as I awaited the callouts — V1, rotate — before easing back on the control wheel. The King Air’s nose lifted off the grooved concrete, the earth fell away — positive rate, gear up — and we were climbing toward our initial altitude of 5,000 feet. I set climb power and gently coaxed the fight director’s command bars into proper alignment, following a shallow left turn to fly JFK’s Skorr Three RNAV Departure as its curving path took us out over the black ocean.
When we reached our assigned level-off altitude, I pulled the power back to cruise and started getting set up to try my hand at some air work, beginning with steep turns.
“Whenever you’re ready,” said the instructor seated behind me. In a real airplane, I normally quite enjoy the challenge of executing maneuvers like steep turns, stalls and unusual attitude recovery. I wondered how I’d do in this hydraulic-motion, full-flight simulator designed merely to closely approximate the handling of the real thing. I added a touch of power and rolled right into my first 360-degree turn. Outside, I could see the horizon tilting in the expected direction. Inside the cockpit, the attitude indicator showed only a momentary pitch-up and nothing else. According to the instrument, we were still wings level. Was this my first simulated instrument failure, I wondered?
“Something’s not right here,” I offered.
“No, it’s not,” my copilot said.
“What’s going on?” asked my instructor, SimuFlite’s Robert Bloom. Clearly he was just as surprised as we were. With a jolt, the illusory sensations of flight came to a halt. Bloom had put us on pause, placing us in a state of suspended animation off the coast of Long Island.
If only you could do that in a real airplane, I thought.
This was my first flight simulator session in the King Air 200 at CAE SimuFlite as well as my first formal introduction to the turbine world after filling my logbook with PIC time mostly in piston singles. Despite the convincing scene of the arriving dawn outside, in reality it was well after midnight and I was in a simulator bay at SimuFlite’s massive training complex next to the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. I was also being asked to fly a slightly different airplane than I’d been expecting, settling in behind the controls of a King Air 200 with steam-gauge instruments rather than a more modern B200 model with EFIS screens. During power up my copilot and I noted a shrill whirring noise from behind the instrument panel that sounded — we belatedly realized — like a failing gyro. The noise disappeared by the time we were ready to depart and so we assumed the instrument just needed time to warm up. That turned out to be an incorrect assessment as the failing attitude indicator chose to die less than 10 minutes after takeoff.
Nearly all of the instrumentation in full-motion, FAA-approved flight simulators like the King Air 200 in which I was training comes from the stock of actual airplanes. Simulator instructors have the power to cause an array of failures, of course, but sometimes instruments can stop functioning of their own accord. In this case, the offending gyro ended my first flight simulator session almost as soon as it started.
The decision was made to call maintenance and have them switch out the electromechanical instruments for the EFIS displays, a process that would take several hours. When I arrived back at SimuFlite the next day, I could hardly believe my eyes. The tired old King Air with the bad gyro had been transformed as if by magic with LCD displays, a Universal UNS-1M flight management system, a radar multifunction display and other extras that made this B200 a significantly improved airplane. I couldn’t have been happier with the transformation.
CAE SimuFlite|
Moving on Up
Another big change on day two was my new copilot. During my aborted flight simulator session the night earlier, I’d gone through all of the pre-departure checklists in fine detail with Walter Mercer, a lead SimuFlite King Air instructor and designated pilot examiner. For the remainder of my training time until my course-completion check ride I would be flying with Tamara McGhee, a 400-hour piston pilot with a fresh commercial ticket and most of her time in Piper Cherokees.
McGhee took her first flying lesson on a whim after seeing an advertisement for a $70 discovery flight in a newspaper. By the time the flight was over, she was hooked. Despite having a limited budget for flight training, she has made it her goal to become a professional pilot.
SimuFlite is playing a big part in helping her realize that dream by offering her a free type rating in a Cessna Citation CJ2 as part of its Right Seat Program, which provides free type ratings for pilots who are willing to put in the time as a copilot in a flight simulator without collecting a paycheck. It involves attending a three-day orientation program, including ground school for the particular airplane in which a candidate will serve in the right seat, plus CRM training. To qualify for a free type rating, right-seaters must fly 80 simulator sessions, with each lasting about five hours, including briefings before and after. Minimum requirements to qualify for the program are 300 hours total flight time and a commercial multi-instrument rating. Despite receiving no pay for her time (and sometimes being pressed into duty in the middle of the night at the 24-hour-a-day training center), McGhee said she views the SimuFlite program as a golden opportunity to learn and grow as a pilot. The promise of a free CJ2 type rating at the end, she said, makes the time spent as a King Air copilot absolutely worth it.
With headquarters in Canada, simulation specialist CAE bought SimuFlite in 2001 and has been expanding ever since. The Dallas center is the biggest business aviation training center in the world, with more than 30 simulators and 450 employees. As you might have guessed, the Right Seat Program is incredibly popular and there currently is a waiting list to sign on.
McGhee and I got along great. I found her to be the perfect cockpit companion since she was a big help with whatever assistance I needed but never overstepped her bounds by accomplishing tasks without being asked or discussing it with me first. We worked quite well together and both enjoyed the chance to hone our cockpit resource-management skills.
Of course, before climbing into the sim there was a lot of time spent in the classroom. During ground school, I marveled at the engineering that went into the King Air design. For instance, the King Air 200 has rudder boost and autofeather systems that make an engine failure during critical phases of flight much more manageable than in a piston twin. As the name implies, autofeather automatically feathers the prop of an engine that has quit. It does so by sensing the difference between the torque output of the two engines, activating if torque falls below a certain percent on either engine. The equally impressive rudder boost system in the King Air 200 constantly monitors the volume of air flowing through each engine, activating when the difference exceeds a certain value because power was reduced on one side. The system helps the pilot by applying just the right amount of rudder pressure in the direction of the good engine. I learned about these phenomenal systems and more during the 10 days I spent at SimuFlite Dallas, the first half of it in ground school with instructor Jim Reeves, a longtime King Air pilot who probably knows as much as anybody about these marvelous airplanes. His knowledge of the King Air 200 and its various systems was encyclopedic, and he taught without ever needing to refer to notes, which to a neophyte like me was more than a little amazing.
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Flying the Simulator
Ground school certainly held my interest, and it was entertaining learning about all of the King Air 200’s various systems, but the real fun started the following week when I was finally allowed in the sim. This particular flight simulator was actually the second in the world to be approved to FAA level-C standards when it was first installed back in the early 1980s. It underwent a series of transformations since then, including an all-new motion system and several iterations of upgraded visuals, the most recent coming last year.
The visuals and handling of the flight simulator were quite good, with a motion system that made it feel like I was flying a real airplane — to a point. I was never truly fooled into believing this was the real thing, as can be the case when seated in the latest level-D full-motion simulators. I had the chance to check out a brand-new electric-motion level-D King Air 350 simulator in the bay next door and was blown away by the realism. The biggest difference between a level-C and level-D simulator is the requirement that level-D devices incorporate daytime visuals. The other is that a level-D simulator can be used for all the training and testing needed to get a type rating while the level-C simulator cannot.
One of my favorite procedural rituals in the flight simulator was the engine start sequence. Starting a PT6 in the King Air involves setting the power levers to idle, the prop levers full forward and the condition levers to fuel cutoff and then switching the battery on and hitting the ignition switch. That gets fuel flowing and the igniter working. From there you stay on the gauges and move the condition lever from fuel cutoff to low idle when N1 turbine speed reaches about 12 percent. Once N1 spools up to 50 percent, you can disengage the starter. Then it’s a simple matter of monitoring the engine gauges, making sure everything is in the green and watching out for a potential hot start or hung start.
Besides the seemingly never-ending series of approaches to minimums on one engine, I spent a couple of sessions learning the specifics of cold- and hot-weather operations. JFK sufficed for the cold-weather portion of the training. For the hot-weather simulation, we headed to Phoenix. One memorable departure from KPHX involved taking off into the teeth of a thunderstorm and experiencing some nasty wind shear at about 50 feet.
** SimuFlite’s Dallas training center is the largest of its kind in the world, with classrooms devoted to each business aircraft model type and state-of-the-art simulators, including a brand-new, electric-motion King Air 350 device.**|
By the day of my check ride, I felt comfortable in the cockpit and had a fairly good idea of what power settings worked for each maneuver and approach. That allowed me to focus on flying the airplane and staying at least a couple steps ahead. The check ride itself went off without a hitch, thanks to the training I received the previous nine days at SimuFlite. My time in Dallas, in fact, was one of the best training experiences I’ve ever been through. There are just some things that can be taught only with the safety net of the simulated environment. Until I sat down in the flight simulator and was asked to push the airplane to its limits, I don’t think I fully understood how valuable this type of training can be. Now that I’ve had a taste, I’m eagerly looking forward to progressing to the next level. That King Air 350 or CJ2 course sound like they could be a lot of fun.
