Page 7 - Twin and Turbine December 16

nd Caravan EX
Putting The Extra In The Cessna Caravan
by LeRoy Cook
gave us a chance to reacquaint ourselves with the 208B in the shelter of its hangar, the skies broke open with the beautiful Midwestern blue we had been promised.
As Jon Grief, demonstration pilot and training specialist, showed us around the big turboprop, we were reminded of both its size and its simplicity. For all its bulk, it’s still a strut-braced high-wing fixed-gear single, like its smaller siblings in the Cessna line. When Cessna laid down the lines for the Caravan, it already knew a lot about making utility airplanes. Fixed gear is more rugged than retractable wheels, and keeping the wing out of the way of loading and obstructions is important. Cessna just scaled up the 206, for the most part.
To differentiate the 208B from the original Caravan, look for a bulge above the cockpit door, forward of the
wingroot; the smaller 208 has the wing leading edge in that location. And there are seven side windows instead of five, thanks to four feet of extra fuselage length. A big plane needs a big powerplant, of course, and turbine power is the answer for needs of more than 350 horsepower or so. The Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A was the choice from very beginning; the 867-shp engine in the Grand Caravan EX takes up no more room than the earlier engines, and it allows the gross weight to grow to 8,807 pounds, a slight increase over the old 208B to preserve useful load.
There are a few changes under the cowling with the new –140 engine; the fuel filter bypass indicator is now checked on the right side of the engine, rather than the left. The old messy EPA can, mandated to catch the small spurt of unburned Jet-A at shutdown, is gone,
DECEMBER 2016
TWIN & TURBINE • 5
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