ORIGINAL: Nathan King
ORIGINAL: bruce88123
I know I gave "great concern" to my initial civilian instructors. Later I had people I was training scare me too, even experienced pilots do dumb things occasionally. Had one guy riding co-pilot (who had 500+hrs in the same plane) feather both engines on short final one day. Now that ticks you off. He was adjusting the props and went past the detent.[:@] He didn't get to fly with me again -
EVER. Oh - I got the plane down safely.
What was he doing moving the props to a coarse pitch for approach and landing anyway?? [X(]
On turbo-props you can set them to max fine pitch (just a couple of degrees from perpendicular to the wind stream) and use them (in effect) as airbrakes. Anything more would add thrust. We were entering base leg at 5,000 ft per minute descent rate. We usually turned a close-in base leg at @ 4,000 ft AGL (traffic permitting). It took us just 3 minutes to descend from 16,000 ft until touchdown. This was after dropping a load of skydivers. We could have done it faster but were speed limited with the door removed. We could carry a full load (22 jumpers) to 15,000 ft AGL and back in 15 minutes (brake release till touchdown).