LAKEBED FUN IN A KING AIR

The Beechcraft King Air comes in many varieties and has been going strong since its first flight in 1963, in both civilian and military roles across the globe.  My forays with the King Air both occurred whilst I was at ETPS but on two different continents and in completely different contexts in aircraft with basically the same cockpits.

The first trip occurred whilst I was on a week long visit to the USAF Test Pilots’ School at Edwards Air Force base in California, a truly huge military base in the desert about 2 hours  North of Los Angeles.  Amongst the events on the visit, part of the annual test pilot schools Headmasters’ conference, were to be a couple of flights in the host school’s aircraft, standard procedure for these events.  Following a rather exciting flight in a USAFTPS T-38 (another story) I was scheduled to fly in the C-12 with a Flight Test Engineer from the French Air Force with one of the key aims to get in a landing on the desert dry lake bed – an North Easterly extension of the main airfield I had often seen used during Space Shuttle missions.

With neither of us having never flown the King Air (C-12) before we received a comprehensive briefing on what we were about to do before we walked out into the late afternoon September heat to walk round our aircraft.  The C-12s used by USAFTPS are nominally C-90s fitted with flight test instrumentation that the students use when conducting their training in flight test techniques and procedures.  Apart from this it would be a familiar ride for King Air rated pilots with a partial glass cockpit and basic radio navigation aid fit.

Everything was a little hot until we got the engines running but we were soon up and away and routed out Northeast to do some general handing in the area around the Death Valley National Park.  The King Air is an easy aircraft to fly with well balanced controls that requires normal handling skills to keep everything smooth and in balance but there isn’t a great deal of automation available with only baseline holds and radio navigation following modes.  To get warmed up for baseline circuit flying and landing manoeuvres it is always necessary when on a new aircraft to practice stall recoveries in and amongst some other baseline flight techniques.

Once these had been completed it was time to head back to Edwards initially to practice approaches to the main tarmac runway, to get our hand in, so to speak.  Bearing in mind that the King Air was designed, from the outset, to be used on short regional airport runways it was pretty straightforward to land on the impressively long 15000 ft (4.5km/2.84 miles) main runway with plenty of room to spare.  It was then time to check out that 9000 ft Rogers Dry lakebed element which sits to the Northeast of the field.

For those of you who have never seen it up close and personal the dry lake bed really is very dry and basically as hard as concrete for most of the year (we were there in September).  Whilst the Space Shuttle might have churned it up a little there was no chance that our King Air was going to do anything of the the sort.  The only issue for us was that without the myriad visual cues you get from a tarmac/concrete runway it was difficult to judge the actual point of touchdown as the lakebed gave a rather flat brown backdrop without much in the way of vertical cues on the horizon (which seemed a very long way off).  In any case everything went as planned and it was certainly another one of those test pilot bucket list items to tick off the list.

My other flight in the King Air occurred right at the end of my time at ETPS when the aircraft arrived at the school on loan from the Royal Air Force Multi Engine Training Squadron.  We had been searching round for a reliable twin engine turboprop for a while after the Andover was retired and I had managed to persuade the RAF to let us use their spare capacity on the school.  My flight was my second to last on the school and definitely my last fixed wing flight, one which I savoured having worked so long to get the aircraft on loan.  I flew with the QFI and whilst similar in profile to the USAFTPS flight the landing was much more mundane.