Delta Virtual Airlines
Water Cooler

Jon Michael Prenovost wrote:

These are photos from my King Air 350 Project. Sadly its a project that in the end crashed and burned. To be honest, in hind sight, I should have never gotten started on it in the first place. I'm sharing this with all of you for a couple of reasons. First and foremost to show you that anything is possible! I got extremely lucky with this, I happen to be in the right place at the right time, had invested time & honest effort into developing relationships with many folks at the airport (KICT), had a couple of connections, and scored HUGE! Which brings me to my second point! Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it...and then not have the funds to back up your dream or expectations. This was very much a lesson in impulse buying at its finest!

So here is the back story, nearly 4 years ago I trip across a King Air 350 that was slotted for scrap yard. It had taken a fatal blow to the tail section one night after a particularly nasty super-cell blew through town and collapsed a number of hangars across town at a smaller airport. Interestingly enough, inside this hangar was the 2000 model 350 I ended up with, along with 5 other brand spanking new 2014 350i(s) that had all left the factory assembly line at Beechcraft, one after the other, one week apart. It took 14 seconds for the hangar to come down, and all six aircraft were lost, total write offs!! All the 2014 models, bring brand new, were stripped down for salvageable parts (and there were allot of them!), but the 2000 model was a whole different story. It was owned by a local air charter firm, they stripped this aircraft as well, but not nearly as surgical as Beechcraft did with their new inventory birds. What was left was a King Air airframe that was mostly intact, NOT airworthy ever again, but definitely sim pit worthy!! I went to work trying to secure this airframe, took about a month of phone calls, face to face conversations, chasing emails, etc. Then one brisk April morning I got "the call" I had been hoping for! The "perfect" sim pit project airframe, especially for a GA project! Its fairly rare to find a King Air airframe for a sim project to begin with, even more rare to find a late model unit to boot, but extremely rare to find one not involved in am actual crash nor had anyone been injured and/or died within this airframe!

The air charter firm's A&P's hot sawed the front end off for me, I loaded it up, took it home, and got started! By the end of the summer I knew I was in serious trouble with this project! Impulse buy! I didn't think this one through! I was foaming at the mouth to secure the airframe at the time, but didn't think ahead, didn't consider what was required to see it through to its conclusion! If you look at the photos its pretty plain to see the first problem, my garage is not a "finished" garage, its not wired with enough electricity or connectivity, and its not insulated nor air conditioned. To get my garage whipped into shape was going to cost between $17-20K. Finishing off the garage was absolutely necessary once I begin installing computer, electronics, controls, etc into the airframe, and long term a necessity for regular & comfortable use/flights of the airframe. They way I wanted to approach this project was to use "top self" kit & gear, mainly Flight Illusion and a few others, but after I priced it out, I was looking at another $25-28K! By late fall of 2016 I had serious doubts about the long term future for this project. For nearly two years this airframe sat in the garage, virtually (no pun intended!) untouched, and finally my wife started to talk some sense into my head. I already had another sim pit well underway in the house, and the airframe in the garage. The truth of the matter was rather blunt and simple, just hard to accept, I could only fly one simulator at a time, but more importantly, and honestly, I could only afford one simulator to begin with. In the end I had to let the airframe go, if for nothing else we needed the space recovered in the garage. It was truly a "once in a lifetime opportunity", I know in my heart of hearts such an opportunity won't ever come around for me again. However, in retrospect, the experience has given me much appreciated wisdom about virtual aviation. No matter how awesome it was to have such a "holy grail" within hobby, it came with a price that my career, household, marriage, and future couldn't cash...I shouldn't have gotten started on this one in the first place. As the old saying goes, "everything in aviation is expensive", and what I've learned from this is, the closer you get to snooping around the "real thing" the faster the price tag racks up, like really fast!! Something else to consider as well. I couldn't do this alone!! It took a small army of people helping me just to get it as far along as I did to begin with. If your going to commit to a project of this size and caliber, think it through before you pull the trigger, actually put pen to paper, crunch some numbers, consider what it's going to take to do it right. If you can't afford to do it right (and by right I mean do an airframe proper justice during conversion), just don't do it!! Putting it into perspective, my ill-fated attempt at this project cost me several THOUSAND dollars, and all I have left is photos, and a few minor parts off the airframe. Going big requires a moment of pause so as to consider all the points on the compass of your project and it's goals.