Page 14 - May21T

First Impressions
T&T Editor Rebecca and I arrived at the fabu- lous Flight Operations building on Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport (KICT) and were greeted warmly by a host of Textron Aviation teammates. We were then escorted to an immaculate white hangar with a brand new gorgeous King Air 360. This particular 360 was all white, awaiting the paint scheme and colors of its future owner. Even in its plain white colors, the 360 looked impressive.
Luke Scott was the Textron Aviation demo pilot assigned to put the King Air 360 through its paces with me. Luke has extensive flight time in many airplanes, but his specialty is the King Air 360. The type rating required to fly any of the King Air 300-series airplanes is the BE-300 type rating, and I’m a DPE with authorization to administer that rating. So, I get to fly in a lot of King Air 300 series aircraft with a lot of King Air 300 series pilots, and I can tell you that Luke was particularly impressive as a pilot and instructor – one of the best I’ve seen. His knowledge of the airplane was Mariana Trench deep, and we instantly bonded from a professional standpoint.
One of the worries I have when a company makes “im- provements” to an already fabulous product is that changes are made to the structure that are really not improvements at all. The iPhone 8 was not better than the iPhone 6S; classic Coke is way better than new Coke; and watermelon Oreos were just terrible. Improvements should really be improvements, not refinements that change the guts of a product. This is good news for the 360 as Beechcraft didn’t change the general structure or engine of the 350. In fact, if a 350 and 360 were parked next to each other, only a true aficionado could tell the difference. That aficionado probably would have to read the data tag to be completely confident.
This is also good news because the classic square/oval shape of the King Air fuselage is probably one of the truly perfect aspects of every King Air. The engines are also the rugged and powerful Pratt and Whitney PT6-60’s that pilots worldwide have grown to trust and appreciate.
The performance of the King Air 360 is identical to the 350 because the drag experienced and thrust provided are identical. But, that performance is spectacular. I can’t think of another airplane that can take off from a 3,500-foot land- ing strip with 10-plus people, a cargo area (including wing lockers) full of bags and toys, the fuel tanks all topped off, and go 1,500 nm while burning 300 pounds of fuel on each side while cruising at FL300 at 300 KTAS. That’s a lot of numbers for one sentence, but suffice it to say the King Air 350/360 will carry a ton, fly a long way fast, and be efficient with fuel. Performance and capability improvements were not the driving force behind the new 360.
Where Are the Differences?
Two areas of consideration received serious upgrades in the King Air 360: safety improvements and a refined interior. To improve upon safety, Beechcraft started by adding autothrottles. I’ll advise that I was a bit skeptical at first that the autothrottles would work well, but once I saw
12 • TWIN & TURBINE / May 2021
About the ThrustSense Autothrottle by IS&S
Innovative Solutions & Support, guided by Chairman and CEO, Geoffrey SM Hedrick, purchased a Pilatus PC-12 in early 2000 and decided to develop an autothrottle system for the aircraft. For the next several years, IS&S worked on it until they came up with a very simple, retrofittable ac- tuator that is truly failsafe.
The patented ThrustSense full-regime autothrottle pro- vides automatic power management from takeoff to touch- down, including go-arounds. In addition to total speed envelop protection, the system also protects the engine against operator-induced exceedances such as engine over-torque and over-temp. With the success of the Thrust- Sense system for the single-engine PC-12, the company turned its attention on using the technology to aid multi- engine pilots.
The ThrustSense autothrottle with LifeGuard has been created to solve the ongoing problem of catastrophic upset that can occur when there is a loss of an engine on a multi-engine turboprop also known as the VMCa problem – when a multi-engine aircraft suffers the failure of one engine. As the pilot tries to maintain altitude and pulls back on the yoke, airspeed reduces to VMCa resulting in loss of directional control.
IS&S bought a King Air in 2018 to use as a testbed for the patented LifeGuard technology. It provides critical VMCa upset protection by dynamically maintaining the maximum safe thrust produced by the “good” engine. As part of the rigorous certification activities, this real-time analysis of control loss due to asymmetric thrust in a sudden loss of airspeed as much as 5 kts/sec, was demonstrated by controlling to the maximum safe thrust of the remaining engine. The pilots maintained directional stability by press- ing the rudder on the side of the failed engine and the airplane stayed controllable all the way down to the stall warning. With loss of an engine, even the best pilots can get into this situation and this innovative technology pro- vides better control and safer operations.
“Textron Aviation has shown great initiative and trust by certifying as a standard feature our ThrustSense auto- throttle with LifeGuard protection on the new-generation King Air 360 and 260,” said Hedrick. “We’re also offering the system as a retrofit solution to other legacy King Air models through their service centers. It integrates with the existing throttle quadrant, so installation and operations are very simple.”
Like with the ThrustSense autothrottle for the PC-12, the twin-engine version provides a host of features including FADEC-like engine protection, over-torque and under-torque protection, under- and over-speed protection, and more.