Kodiak 100 Walkaround with Mark Brown

[Music] hey guys mark brown here I'm the chief demo pilot and director of marketing for quest aircraft company I'm here in front of American Kodiak one of the Kodiak dealers our Kodiak dealer here for the state of Texas I'm here with their airplane and today we're going to do a walk-around of the Kodiak 100 series too so we're going to start up here with the very front of the plane the propeller so what we have here is a 96 inch Hartzell 4 bladed prop what makes this prop so great is the clearance it provides from the ground so it's got 19 inches of prop clearance the Kodiak was designed as a modern-day Bush airplane it was designed in the late 1990s early 2000s because there was a need there was no airplane that ran on jet fuel that had a turboprop engine that was really designed and built to go off Airport and into the end of the bush if you will so everything around the Kodiak is designed with that mindset this is the best off airport bush plane made but it's also you can think of it kind of like a Range Rover or a toyota landcruiser with wings it's a very refined luxury SUV but it has the bran and the beef to go off airport so that 19 inches of clearance is extremely important it obviously is fully feather feathering reversible prop so you can use the reverse thrust to help you stop even quicker on takeoff or on landing excuse me coming back from there you'll notice this air intake is very high off the ground again done for the the purpose of off-airport type operations it also can't sup just a little bit and again that's for fog on takeoff and landing so it doesn't come in we actually inside of the take out of the into air intake is what we call the inertial separator which is a way for the air flow to actually come in the engine go down and then it has to come back up so in in cases where we're landing on very loose gravel type strips are flying through heavy precipitation or ice that way the airflow does their the the Fahd goes out the bottom of the plane and the air is the only thing that can make that turn the engine we have behind this cowling is the PT six - 34 a or - 34 excuse me it creates 750 horsepower one of the reasons that we pick - this engine number one had the horsepower rating that we needed for the airplane number two is it's one of the most widely produced PT six engines so from that standpoint there's a whole lot of them out there flying there's a whole lot of parts availability for them they're very reliable so what it allows is the cost of operations of the airplane to be significantly lower than any comparable single-engine PT six one of our first customers was humanitarian groups and obviously they count all their pennies because they work on mostly donations so a low cost of operations is very important for them and of course for your average owner operator or a commercial operator that might use the Kodiak the lower that the operating cost the higher they can their profit margin will be coming back from there these are exhaust decks built by Frakes aviation here in Cleburne Texas they're designed for the Kodiak they give it the the right they actually add a little bit of thrust to it and they don't impede performance so they're they're great stacks specific to this airplane moving back we'll get to the landing gear the nose gear so the nose gear on the Kodiak and the landing gear in general is really quite impressive and it's one of the things that makes the Kodiak very unique among its single-engine turboprop competitors this has the large tire option so both the mains and the nose wheel have the large large 29 inch tires the nose fork all the way up if you took this selling off its really impressive just how much structure and rigidity there is in the nose gear as you can see just by looking at this torque tube and just how thick it is it's really quite impressive so one of the things that we say this isn't an FAA regulation or anything like that but the gear is rated to a nine-inch stump load so in essence the gear should be able to hit a nine-inch tree stump and I'll be okay which is pretty impressive if you think of just how tall a nine-inch tree stump would be normally it would shear the gear off of a lot of airplanes moving a little bit further back I'll open the engine cowling here so we can have a look at what's inside so it looks pretty standard to a typical PT six installation what you look looking up here so the gold is the 300 amp starter generator that's standard equipment on every kodiak we have an alternator here we have this airplane has the optional AC so it's an engine driven compressor that we have here here we have the oil cooler so that's what this NACA duct is for this cools the oil obviously going to and from the engine this is our brake fluid reservoir so it's about the only hydraulics on this plane besides the tks anti-icing system the great thing about the Kodiak from a maintenance standpoint is all the maintenance on this plane is very easy and very relatively speaking cheap so one of the design criteria of the plane was that a lot of these humanitarian missions and operations actually have pilot mechanics flying this plane and they're flying into the most remote regions of the world in Papua New Guinea Indonesia the Amazon Africa places like that so the airplane was designed obviously not to break but if it does break it had to be very simple and relatively inexpensive to fix by a pilot mechanic with a set of spares because if you're stranded and a bush trip in Papua New Guinea you might be there for a couple days waiting on another Kodiak to come deliver the parts so everything is over built on the plane and the things that do tend sometimes to break they're very easy to fix with just one person with a set of tools so again that makes the cost of operations even lower just with with that mindset and the fact that there's no life limited parts on the plane so the the Kodiak is as a whole rated to about twenty thousand hours obviously that will get extended as the Kodiak lineage lives on but the great thing with no life limited parts is nothing has to be torn off the plane and tested at various cycle intervals or time intervals so from a maintenance standpoint pretty much every annual is very similar there's not an annual that you'll get a couple years down the road where for instance you have to take the landing gear off send it out takes a couple weeks to get back it's very expensive the Kodiak doesn't have anything like that so yeah moving over to the copilot side the right side of the plane will open up this engine cowling just to have a look and see what's in here so you can see a little bit more on this side what we have here is the bleed air muffler system the rest of this we have the FCU and all the engine components there's two batteries in every car I don't know it'll might be hard to see but if you look down here you can see just how robust the the engine firewall and and engine mount is but there's a carry through cross tube here on the engine engine mount and that's on every kodiak so one of the things that often times has to be done when you put an airplane on floats is you have to add a whole bunch of additional you have to add a whole bunch of additional structure and components to make it float equipped the great thing about the kodiak is every kodiak comes off the line ready to be put on floats so when you put the kodiak on arrow set floats there's really no additional aerodynamic or structural upgrades that you have to do which is pretty unique to this platform obviously one of our co-founders and the designer of the kodiak was Tom Hamilton Tom Hamilton's also also widely known as the arrow set guy and of course the 66 50 and 60 750 floats are certified for the for the airplane the arrow set floats carbon-fiber floats really impressive it makes the in my opinion the best seaplane out there off the water time is at full gross weight something like 20 to 25 seconds so moving back there's not a whole lot on this side but I will point out right here we have the lot of people ask what this light is for well this a particular airplane is equipped with the tks anti-icing system and this light is your isolate so when you're flying at night you can turn that on it shines a bright light on the leading edge of the wing and of course you can see if you're building ice or not at night you can see the tks system here on the leading edge so it's this titanium there's tiny little microscopic holes all along here pretty interesting thing is we have tks on our struts as well as our wheel fairings a lot of people wonder why there's kind of two reasons these are obviously big large surfaces that will build ice and heavy icing conditions they're also air foils so technically they're they're a type of a lifting surface so we have to obviously have ice come off and cannot build on any lifting surface of the plane so as we work out the wing design of the Kodiak is probably the most unique feature set of the airplane it's what during our D during our developmental process of the plane we spent probably the most time and money on and what what makes the wing so unique as a couple couple reasons number one it's a high coefficient of lift wing which basically means it's a very thick wing so it produces a lot of lift which is part of the reason why it's such a great Stowell plane it also allows the plane to build ice and be very safe in ice we did icing testing to various levels of ice build up the Kodiak never was in dire straights it was never you know falling out of the sky like some other airplanes are known to do from piston all the way up to multi-engine airplanes so you can get a lot of contaminants on a high lift wing and you still create a lot of lift the really unique part about the the Kodiak wing is above me here so a lot of people notice because the only way to tell is what we call the discontinuous leading edge so the discontinuous leading edge is the marker actually for a different airfoil which starts here at rib 13 and goes out outboard what makes this wing design so unique is if it theoretically makes a unstoppable wing so on a straight wing airplane like the Kodiak the stall starts at the wing root works its way out and then eventually gets to the tip and anybody that's ever flown an airplane or done flight training will know that when you stall and airplane typically one wing drops before the other and the only way to get out of it is by adding power and pushing the nose forward to get lift back on the wing the Kodiak wing what happens is in a flaps clean situation so flaps zero the stall will stop right here and this outboard wing will never lose lift so if you notice the outboard wing and lines up perfectly with the aileron so if you have lift going over this section of the wing you have full aileron control through the stall what that means is I can sit with a Kodiak with the power off situation or a zero thrust rating I can sit there with a stick all the way back in my belly and I have full aileron control through it so the Kodiak will never drop a wing that's unrecoverable during a stall which means during the most you know dangerous phases of flight when you're when you're slow speed you always have a ler on control that was done for a number of reasons but first and foremost is safety we believe the Kodiak is with its modern certification 2007 amendment 55 certification is one of the safest airplanes this wing obviously makes it even safer so moving back in board a lot of people notice these flat tracks so these flap tracks are really unique and I like to point them out because it's one of the one of the very obvious signs of just how robust and well-built the Kodiak is so if you notice if you get up real close these flap tracks don't have any weld marks in them they're machined out of a solid block of aluminum for strength and quality efficiency or quality control so it's the the strongest way to build a flat track and as we all know the flap tracks aren't particularly under a high stress load except when the flaps are out so if the flaps are made this well you can see how how well everything else is made on the on the plane it's a there's three flap settings on a Kodiak there's 10 20 and 35 degrees every every kodiak takeoff is done with 20 degrees of flaps every kodiak landing well you can do different landings but recommended we typically land with full flaps at 35 degrees one interesting thing that I like to point out is this is a pretty neat feature especially for operators that are doing high load low fuel type situations so what this says is a fuel dipstick so I'm just going to break it free from its magnet and as you can see here there's different fuel levels so if I push this up right there it stops so if I look here I have about 425 pounds of fuel in this wing that's a really easy accurate way for me to check the fuel load in the wing without having to crawl up on top and it gives me a way to verify because everything and flying is always double check so obviously my my avionics is going to tell me how much fuel I have but I want to double check and this is a very easy simple way for me as a pilot to double check how much fuel this wing has moving down here to the landing gear as I mentioned earlier this is the these are the 29 inch larger tire options they look pretty small when you see the Kodiak just because the Kodiak such a big airplane but you can see here it's a it's a pretty substantial tire the cool thing with the landing gear and the tire specifically is they were certified to a lower psi so one of the big problems with bush planes or airplanes that have been adapted to be bush planes that maybe weren't designed that from the start is the tire pressure tends to be very you actually have a certified tire pressure range the you can be in and a lot of those tires are too inflated they're they're too much psi in them so when you get onto a soft strip like this what will happen is the tire will actually run out sink in that can be really dangerous and a takeoff or landing can scenario because one tire might rut differently than the other which could pull the airplane off the runway one way or the other the Kodiak tires were certified to a lower psi so it will actually float on top of a soft type surface so again just the Kodiak was designed from the ground up to be a modern-day bush plane so even things like the tire PSI is designed for that that type of mission so how the Kodiak you know I talk a lot about the modern-day bush plane and it's great if you're flying into Papua New Guinea or Amazon and the Amazon but for instance here we're in Texas tonight and we're here at a gentlemen 600-acre ranch he lives about an hour-and-a-half drive from DFW Airport or one of the major you know LUT Dallas Love Field or Fort Worth Meacham what's great about the Kodiak and how this stuff translates to your everyday maybe High Net Worth purchaser is coat the Kodiak can be supplemental lift so you can never fly a jet into here but maybe a customer might have a jet flying to and from you know Dallas to Los Angeles or Dallas to New York and they still have an hour-and-a-half drive to get back to their their home out here in northeast Texas so the Kodiak can go to the Love Field and in 11 minutes pick them up and land here at their 1000 foot airstrip outside on their 600 acre ranch it's all done obviously in very safe luxurious configurations with the Kodiak so a lot of people say well the bush and stole is great but how does it benefit me as just a private pilot or owner operator and it has a lot of uses and it's you know helicopter could do the same thing but a helicopters three times as expensive so this is a more economical way to get to and from your back door without having to drive anywhere so moving on I wish when I when I told people this the fairing wasn't here but to continue on with the landing year what makes the Kodiak really specific is the wing and also the way the landing gear is designed so if we took this fairing off you can kind of visualize in here is a solid steel what we call a solid steel trunnion and you can see the rivet lines actually go up and this is in line with the rear spar of the plane so the wing the strut the landing gear is all connected and it's all designed to be extremely robust so there's no you're not gonna sheer the the landing gear off on a Kodiak you're gonna you know it's always going to be there which we believe is the safest scenario is to always have your landing gear you don't want one of them to you know after a hard landing land and and you're you're flying down the runway with only one wheel so that all connects and then in this solid steel trunnion there's to carry through tubes in here that are about a three inch steel tube that carries the the gear through to the other side and it's all interconnected and then from here there's about a three inch to a two inch tapering tube so a lot of people say well how does the the landing gear work how does the shock absorption work well this arm obviously flexes up and what happens in here is when this arm flex is up these arms flex down and that's how you get your shock absorption and the landing gear it's really stiff but it's designed to go into the roughest terrain it obviously has that nine-inch stump rating as well so it's not the most is you're never going to have the softest landings in a Kodiak but you can land just about anywhere which i think is pretty cool we also have inside a lot of people ask does a Kodiak a fixed-gear airplane have a Squatch switch or what we call a weight on wheels switch a while switch and it does it's actually part so when that when the weight comes off the wheels this part of the gear comes down the interior comes the the weight comes off the interior carry throughs and that's how you get your weight on wheels switch working that's how the airplane knows if it's in the air or if it's on the ground moving back I'll just touch on the windows here the cool thing about the Kodiak was it's a 10 place airplane so a pilot plus nine people you can have different interior configurations but in max configuration you'll notice everybody has a window seat and there's no two on one side one person on the other the windows is single aisle and two two sets of seats so the windows are also placed correctly for when you're sitting inside instead of having to bend your neck over and look out like that you can just turn your head and it's a great scenic tour platform so again all of this was purposely thought out from the ground up there was no adaptation of the Kodiak being a scenic tour plane we knew from the get-go it would be a very good scenic tour plane and it was designed to do that the other cool thing is you can fly the Kodiak at 70 or 80 knots if you really wanted to circle around something and look at it which the fly and airplane with ten people in it at 70 or 80 knots just doesn't feel right but even at those speeds you have a ton of margin working our way a little further back a lot of people ask what these are for this is part of the air conditioning system here we have a rear evaporator for the for the rear passengers here moving up obviously you have your new this is a series two so we have a series two paint scheme on this Kodiak the NACA duct up there on the dorsal fin that is for fresh air intake this is the ELT antenna the big white antenna yet you see here moving a little bit further back a lot of people wonder what these are for these strikes are you'll only see these on on airplanes with a cargo pod or with floats and basically what they do is there's a little low pressure system that's created back here and flight with the cargo pod and these kind of reach out to grab the air you'll you'll see these on on other airplanes especially jets like if you look at a Learjet they've got pretty big rear strike so they're pretty common they just stand out a little bit more on the Kodiak moving back the so you'll notice the the vertical stabilizer and rudder are pretty big and that is because we have a ton of horsepower and the front we have 750 horsepower a lot of people call us a short coupled airplane that basically means from the tip to the tail is shorter than it you know a normal airplane if you will and that's part of the need for the large vertical surface and large rudder is just to have that full control when you're full power on takeoff the elevator and horizontal stabilizers are nothing great here you'll notice it's pretty wide so as the CG envelope of the airplane increases the wider the horizontal surface has to be so the Kodiak has obviously a very large CG envelope so that's why this this tail surface is so wide back here I'll make note of the trims so the Kodiak being a modern airplane designed in 2000 or certified in 2007 the trims all three trims aileron elevator and rudder trim are all fully electric so there's no old manual gear levers that you have to move to do the trims it's all nice electric switches this is the the elevator trim tab right here moving back not a not a whole lot to see you will notice there's VG's all over the plane VG's are these little strakes right here they help with slow speed end sometimes high speed flight it basically grabs on to the air and sucks it back in it's what part of part of what allows the Kodiak to be such a good slow speed short takeoff and landing plane moving up here we'll get to the back door the cool thing about this door is it's the dimensions are forty nine and a quarter by forty nine and a quarter we did that on purpose because we knew people were going to load pallets or stretchers and other things typical size for a pallet is 40 by 48 so a paddle our slide right in so the door is a opens just like that and one thing I'd like to point out is the Kodiak has a lot of simple cool engineering things that are well thought out one of these things is just with two little let downs I can let the door slide all the way down and now I can get a stretcher or a pickup truck or a forklift right up into the plane load a pallet move it forward so even though the Kodiak wasn't necessarily designed for cargo per se it is a great cargo plane especially if you have heavy cargo loads because the Kodiak can nearly carry itself the useful load and the empty weight are about the same so if you theoretically if you could put a Kodiak inside of here it could it could take off what the other nice thing about these is the way this door is designed and what I personally like is the simplicity of it there's no mechanics there's nothing to break it's just a ball and joint type socket and the Kodiak has as I mentioned earlier a lot of these simple things because it was designed to operate in the bush so mechanical and and things tend to break apart especially in high hot humid salty environments so just something simple like this is a great engineering way to fix this problem looking inside here excuse the mess but we have the Timberline interior so I can flick the switch on right here which is kind of neat it's not quite dark enough out to need it but this is the Timberline interior this is our mid-level interior in our tan color we have two color options with the series two we have a tan and what we call it cool gray the Timberline interior has upgraded seats they're all forward-facing seats they don't the the seat tracks run forward to back so you can actually place the seats wherever you want but once they're placed they're fixed so they don't recline or anything like that but the Timberline seats are nicer we fly constantly with our executives four or five hours sometimes per flight and a lot of our people tell us that they really enjoy these seats they're very comfortable for long flights I don't get to sit back here very often so I'm not a good person to ask but I've heard good things we also have this carpet I personally love the carpet because it snaps out so what's so cool about that is I can snap the carpet out take all the seats out and within about 10 15 minutes I have a pickup truck I can put it all back in in 10 to 15 minutes and now I have a pretty luxurious passenger passenger transport the other cool thing with these seats and specifically our tundra saw our lowest level interior or our commuter style interior these seats fold up into a pancake so when you take them out they fold up pretty nicely and they'll actually fit in the cargo pod so you can take all the seats out put them in the cargo pod as I mentioned take the carpet out and now you don't even have to leave the seat somewhere so you can take passengers one direction and take cargo something like oil drums or cargo back the other direction so it's a multi-purpose workhorse that does everything pretty well here you can see the window placement it's great for the seats every seat has a window this airplane has the optional cargo pod option I'll just open these right here this is just extra storage basically it adds a lot of versatility to the plane because if you do fill the seats up with ten people this would be where you would store the luggage so there's three compartments there is a little bit of gap between each compartment so I've seen people put fly fishing rods or skis or snowboards up on that so they will fit these fit golf packs really nicely it's just a all around with the cargo pod it's a really versatile tool and last but certainly not least is the cockpit so the Kodiak has the Kodiak 100 series to has the new g1000 NX I I can quickly power it on the great thing about the nxi is it is very fast to boot it also has a ton of new features that the legacy g1000 doesn't have but you'll you'll notice even little refinements like the leather wrapped yoke here that's been standard on every kodiak from day one so it's a pretty it's a pretty well refined and very safe intuitive airplane the g1000 also comes with the GFC 700 autopilot so that autopilot has full go-around ESP all the all the latest and greatest safety upgrades so it really makes this a very capable all-weather airplane so that's the Kodiak and thanks to American Kodiak our dealer for the south central states Texas Arkansas Louisiana Oklahoma Nebraska I'm sure I'm missing some in there but anyway if if you guys are in that territory give American Kodiak a call and if you have any questions go to quest aircraft comm

Channel: Erik Johnston

Views: 160,958

Keywords: Kodiak, Kodiak 100, Mark Brown, Bush Plane, Ranch, Grass Strip, Grass Runway, Bush, Back Country, American Kodiak, Turboprop, Turbo Prop, Prop, Propeller, Turbine, Jet, Airplane, Plane, Pratt & Whitney, PT-6, Aviation, Walkaround, Erik Johnston, Texas, Landing Gear, Tour

Id: kZhZfm3M5Z4

Length: 31min 24sec (1884 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2019