Never Again: Gang bar down

Not all trips had gone this well. Flying assorted King Air and Dash 8 aircraft between our company headquarters in rural Virginia and various locations in the Pacific, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa serves up plenty of opportunity for misadventure. But by this time we’d learned some good lessons about readying aircraft for the rigors of an 8,000-mile journey through dusty deserts and arctic blasts, to the point that the mean time between failures of any form had been reduced significantly.

There was no way that several years previous on my first transatlantic leg—from Goose Bay, Canada, to Narsarsuaq, Greenland—I could have anticipated the level of calm I have come to have over these icy, turbulent waters. Complacency was still held at bay, but the trepidation of the first dozen or so crossings has faded, no longer forcing a fitful sleep the night before. And once leaving the United Kingdom behind on a westbound journey it felt like I was in my backyard again, albeit a large one.

There are always a million details to manage on a multi-continent, transoceanic journey: fuel logs, flight plans, immigration forms, weather, aircraft documents, crew documents, hotels, handlers, deicing procedures, oxygen servicing; the list is interminable. To keep pertinent information available without the internet, or even without electricity—like in the airplane, or even in some hotels I’ve stayed in—I’ve found a large three-ring binder with tab dividers to be indispensable. I call it my “brain,” and in a King Air it sits upright on the floor pinned against the cockpit sidewall by my left calf, ready for route consultation, general declaration completion, and the like.

Inbound to Keflavik, Iceland (BIKF), at flight level 250 with an hour or so remaining, I reached for my “brain” to review the overnight arrangements. Lifting the hefty notebook with my left hand as I had done many times on the trip already, I eased it slowly between the yoke and cockpit sidewall. At some point during that process our peaceful little world shattered. The autopilot disconnected, the radios and intercom went dead, and every single electrical flight and engine instrument stopped working. To add insult to injury the cabin began to depressurize. There had been no warning that a complete electrical loss was imminent, and even more important, there were no alarms or lights telling us what had gone wrong.

We had several things on our side, however. The weather was severe clear in every direction, and we had daylight to spare. Winter crossings often require a predawn takeoff and a night landing simply because there is precious little daylight at those latitudes. But we could see everything we needed to keep the airplane right side up.

Thankfully my co-pilot was alert and immediately recognized the problem. “You hit the gang bar,” he shouted, our headsets now interfering with rather than aiding our communications. He followed that in very short order by announcing, “I have the controls!” Our right-side attitude indicator is powered pneumatically, another thing we had working in our favor. Not that we couldn’t control the airplane by visual reference, but every piece of reliable data helps when you’re suddenly faced with so much confusing information.

In this King Air 200 the battery and generator switches are located just above the pilot’s left knee with a gang bar, or metal tab, resting above those switches to be used for complete and immediate electrical power shutdown in the event of significant smoke or an electrical fire. What had been designed to be helpful in an emergency had become hurtful, causing a potential emergency.

With the co-pilot now flying the airplane, I asked him to initiate a moderate descent because of the depressurizing cabin. An emergency descent wasn’t required since the cabin altitude was climbing relatively slowly and we had every expectation of recovering electrical power. We donned the oxygen masks and made sure we had good flow. I turned the battery and both generators back on. We advised Reykjavik Control of our descent to 10,000 feet; reviewed our actions to this point, as well as our plan for the remainder of the flight; then watched as the cockpit recovered to a lower altitude and the navigation systems reacquired satellites. Soon we could take off the oxygen masks and enjoy the view of the Iceland coast.

Somewhere in the sequence of picking up the all-important notebook, my hand must have bumped the instrument panel, releasing the notebook from my hand onto the gang bar, forcing it down and the battery and generator switches Off. I wonder how many King Air pilots have experienced a similar event, possibly not reported because of a disastrous ending? Had we been in solid IMC—or worse yet, night—our recovery likely would not have been so smooth.

Now, even in the daytime, I make sure I have a flashlight in good condition placed such that with very little effort it can be retrieved and directed toward the flight instruments. Little things can become big things very quickly in an airplane. And I admit to wondering if there should be a modification available that would create a detent so that gang bar down would always be intentional.

Dan Gleason of Bridgewater, Virginia, has been a pilot for more than 30 years and has provided more than 7,000 hours of dual instruction.