Sorry, but I must disagree with Old Fog Ducker (I love that handle though
).
I have around 700 hours in MU-2s and I hate the blasted things. Yeah the newer models are fast and don’t burn a bunch of fuel but they still pieces of crap. They are the cheapest turbo-prop airplanes on the market today and there is a good reason for that fact, they have the highest accident rate of any civilian aircraft by a large margin. The MU-2 is a very dangerous airplane when flown by any low time pilot or a pilot with low high- performance aircraft experience.
Old Fog Ducker is very correct on one point, the NTS. Under no circumstances what so ever should anyone even think about flying an MU-2 with the NTS not working. When I attended MU-2 Flight Safety School in Houston an instructor told a story about a training flight that he was on. They were at 15,000 feet and on this flight part of the training was to shut down an engine and restart it by using the CRS (Crank-Run-Stop) switch. During the after start check on the ground they did not get a good check on the NTS check on the right engine, the instructor decided that it was just probably a bad test and that the NTS was okay, bad decision. He said that he forgot about the bad test and when it was time to shut down an engine he shut down the right engine, another bad decision.
He stated that no sooner than he placed the CRS switch to Off the aircraft rolled inverted to the right and started a tight spiral to the right heading nearly straight down pegging the VSI. He immediately feathered the engine and started the recovery. After pulling heavy Gs they recovered at 2,000 feet. This demonstration was usually performed at 10,000 feet, however for some reason he had climbed to 15,000 feet that day. He said that he was positive that if he had been at 10,000 feet they would not have survived.
In the 700 some odd hours I have in MU-2s I have had the following problems.
Electrical fire behind the bulkhead in the baggage compartment in a stretched model due to bad wiring. What made this incident rather interesting was that I had to kill the electrical system which, one caused the aircraft to depressurize and secondly disabled the auto-pilot; the latter is significant due to the fact that it was a single pilot operation. I was very fortunate to have a former Air Force pilot in the right seat that day and he flew the aircraft while went to the back of the cabin into the baggage area to extinguish the fire.
Fuel cap structural failure on the right tip tank. The top half was found on the runway and the bottom half was in the fuel tank. As this happened on liftoff and if one remembers that the fuel tank is pressurized one can under stand the control problem I had with a full tip tank on the left wing and a nearly empty tip tank on the right wing. I managed to get the thing back on the ground landing on a taxiway, believe it or not the left tip tank didn’t hit the ground when I landed, it didn’t miss the ground by much though.
Door seal would not deflate after landing because it was frozen shut. (This happen to me three times.)
On two occasions I had to crank the landing gear down due to frozen gear door prox switches. (After the second time we started covering the switches with grease when operating on contaminated runways.)
While checking out another company pilot for his three takeoffs and landings he inadvertently retracted the flaps from full down to the first setting. (This was on a J model; later models had a different style switch which prevented this problem.) We were on a 2 mile final when he retracted the flaps, only by putting the flaps back to the full down position and applying full power was I able to keep us from crashing short of the runway in the approach lighting. That thing started to drop out of the sky like a brick when those flaps started retracting.
The strangest thing I have ever had happen to me on ANY airplane I have flown was in a brand new MU-2. The cockpit in the MU-2 is rather cramped for space, therefore the auto-pilot control head folds down under the throttle quadrant to ease access to the pilot’s seats. After getting into the seat you pull up the control head and it locks into place. Very simple, right? Fool proof, right? One would think so, but alas the answer is no. As Old Fog Ducker stated one is always trimming the MU-2 and right after takeoff during flap retraction one is trimming away like a crazed maniac. On this takeoff as the flaps where retracting and as I was trimming nose up the aircraft started to yaw to the left. Uh-oh I think the left engine is quitting, however as look down at the throttles I see that the left throttle (or thrust lever if you must) is about half way back to idle. I figure that it must have vibrated back so I just shove it back where it belongs and tighten the friction lock tighter. (I was wrong.) A couple of takeoffs later the same thing happens, however this time I just happened to be looking at the throttle as I was trimming nose up and realized that when I trimmed the nose up the left throttle would retract. (And no trimming nose down would not move the throttle back up, I tried that.) I thought that this was very interesting, dangerous but interesting. I mean the last thing anyone needs on an MU-2 is loss of power while the flaps are retracting after takeoff. I decided that the trip I was on wasn’t that important in the overall scheme of life and I turned around and landed.
If one has been paying attention one will recall what I wrote at the start of the last paragraph about the auto-pilot control head. Please remember this little fact. As we were trouble shooting this perplexing problem in the hangar I could not get the throttle to move a bit on its own no matter what I did. I trimmed nose up, I trimmed nose down, hell I even ran the trim ailerons for the wings and the rudder trim, nothing! So I am wandering around mumbling to myself while the maintenance people where standing in a tight little group casting dirty looks at me muttering things such as ‘dumb ass pilot’ and ‘sh!t for brains.’ Suddenly it hit me, the auto-pilot control head! I had lowered the head down after I landed and it was still in the stowed position. I jumped back into the cockpit put the head back into up position and ran the trim, sure enough the left throttle moved back as I trimmed nose up. What had happened was that the wiring bundle for the auto pilot wrapped around the cables from the manual trim wheel and the bottom of the left throttle when the control head was locked into the up position, when the trim wheel turned the cable would drag the left throttle back. That was a very interesting call to the factory I can tell you. Mitsubishi issued an AD note to correct the problem.
There were many more problems that I had with the MU-2s but enough is enough.
Anyway I have wasted enough of Danny web space for now. Just remember that these MU-2s I flew were for corporate operations and were well maintained. I had more problems with MU-2s in my career than all the other aircraft I have flown in my 21,000 some odd hours combined.