September 2004
When I took my friend Jim Corley as a partner in my light twin, we already knew that we’d be spending the first few flights doing a comprehensive checkout—that is, after we got some of the other preliminaries out of the way first.
Jim and I had come to terms over a pleasant dinner with the wives, during which I scribbled some notes on a napkin and the next day drew up a five-page agreement that spelled out clearly the how’s and what’s of our bourgeoning co-ownership.
We divvied up what we envisioned would be our future responsibilities: Jim got the hangar and cosmetic chores, while I inherited the maintenance, accounting and paperwork trail.
The next step in the process was an easy one—for me, at least. Since I had designed the layout of the airplane’s one-year rebuild and had worked closely with the mechanics who did the work, I had all the paperwork necessary to keep Jim reading late on more than one night. Everything on board the airplane was brand-new and, consequently, had an official operating manual to be studied.
In addition, I had assembled a very comprehensive airplane flight manual that contained all those official documents that all too often wind up getting stuffed into a wrinkled folder that is eventually jammed into an airplane seatback and hardly ever looked at again.
Done with his paperwork and operating manuals review, Jim and I were ready to fly—almost.
Both of us came from lengthy airline flying stints that we had retired from a few years previous (me, with USAir for over 36 years; Jim with TWA for slightly less), so doing more rather than less in preparation to fly a new airplane was a familiar method of operation for the both of us. It was time to sit in the airplane and discuss how this piece of equipment interfaced with that, and vice-versa.
One of the best pieces of equipment that I ever bought was a battery charger/power supply unit that used normal 115 volt household power to convert it to a useable 28 volts DC that was my light twin’s preferred diet.
I’m here to tell you—and Jim would eagerly agree—that it is far, far easier to learn the nuances of all our modern electronic gadgetry while sitting in a quiet environment on the ramp adjacent to the hangar. Trying to do the same thing with the airplane’s engines running is like trying to drink from a fire hose—and that’s without mentioning the sense of urgency that the ground-running of engines will produce in any pilot who cares about rising engine temperatures and wasted fuel consumption.
With everything electrical already cooking, I could give as much time as necessary to any particular cockpit do-dah so Jim would clearly understand how each piece of gear was designed to fit with the others.
During the design of the airplane, I had decided that it would be really nice to have at least two totally independent sources of whatever tricks the airplane was capable of. For example, the primary navigation is done by a Garmin 530 GPS which is also plumbed directly to a Bendix/King 850 multi-function display screen to provide a larger scale moving map, plus complete datalink weather capability.
But what if the Garmin 530 were to fail (and anything that a pilot can turn on is more than capable of turning itself off—and usually at the worst possible time—on a given trip)? Would that mean that we would lose our big moving map and all of our datalink weather?
No, because we had taken the time to install a 50-cent transfer switch (it was an FAA approved switch, so the actual cost was probably closer to 50 dollars than 50 cents) which switched the Bendix/King 850 MFD box from its primary connection to its backup unit—a Garmin 430 GPS. This way, the failure of either GPS was a non-event from a cockpit management point of view, once the transfer switch was thrown.
Another example was a piece of equipment that every year I’ve learned to love twice as much as the year before—and I liked it a great deal right out of the box when we first put it in. The Ryan 9900BX TCAD makes flying in crowded skies far easier and safer and it’s become hard to imagine not being able to “see” (and see quite accurately) all the other air traffic that’s out there.
In my normal mode of operation, I leave the Garmin 430 screen on its dedicated traffic display page so that I have a very readable indication of who is where in the skies around me (navigation chores are done on the Garmin 530, and displayed on the Bendix/King 850 MFD). But if that Garmin 430 display screen were to go blank en route, those traffic indications would also be simultaneously appearing on the Bendix/King and Garmin 530 screens.
Insight’s TAS 1000 was another small addition to the instrument panel that came with a big payoff. Billed by Insight as a “multi-function data source,” the small TAS 1000 digital display screen cycles through scads of data that backs up all sorts of primary panel inputs.
In addition to providing the air data inputs that enable the Garmin GPS units to show the actual winds aloft at any given moment, the unit is the backup source for all the basic air pressure indications in the cockpit. Using a separate pitot tube/static port that had originally been plumbed to a panel-crowding array of copilot flight instruments, the TAS 1000 gives a truly redundant readout of indicated and true airspeed, density and pressure altitude and air temperature—to name just a few.
One of the reasons that a quiet cockpit checkout is necessary in an airplane this complex is that the instrument panel contains so much useful data that it would be very easy indeed to forget how to extract a good portion of it. By the time Jim and I had spent upwards of an hour at this preflight briefing, he knew what each switch did. More importantly, he also understood why it did what it did, and how it accomplished its job. With that sort of in-depth understanding, it is far easier for pilots to get a real handle on the capabilities of the airplane in front of them, and to remember what is being shown.
Now for the piece de resistance, the “flow check.” Since Jim and I were both airline guys, we were very familiar with the need for a standardized cockpit flows in order to get all those switches and levers in the proper positions.
While a light twin is pretty far down the evolutionary scale when compared to a Boeing widebody, after you’ve crammed the panel full with the modern stuff that’s available there really isn’t all that much difference—at least from the driver-in-the-seat point of view.
Using the airplane’s original checklist as a basis, I had created my own comprehensive “flow” checklist for when you climbed onboard to get things going. Beginning at the panel’s far left, the pilot moves across in a methodical fashion, powering things up, setting things up for engine start, positioning levers and switches thusly.
Once the engines are running, the flow pattern continues through the Before Takeoff checklist with various items being set to predetermined display pages so that the pilot’s goal is to see the same things at the same point during the flight.
One example I pointed out to Jim was that, once the engines were running, I set the Electronics International fuel flow gauges from the window that displayed “pressure” during the starting process to the one that now showed “flow.” This way, on takeoff, I would be seeing the actually fuel flow that was going to each engine—a reading that should have a direct correlation to all the other engine gauge readings that the panel was capable of showing me.
Our modern gadgetry has so much data potential that if a pilot doesn’t pick and choose which particular reading would be most relevant in which situation, then the messages from the gauges can become more confusing than helpful.
At this point in Jim’s checkout, we had to take a short break to get a soft drink and let his brain decompress some from all the information that was flowing in… and remember, we had yet to even begin to start an engine.
Before the first spark plug lit a fire in that first cylinder, my new partner Jim Corley knew a great deal about his new airplane. Soon, he would know a great deal more.
