Cessna Caravan Engine Upgrade
Klaudia Aricas
This upgrade is the most powerful and economical of the options for Caravan and Grand Caravan, offering increased climb and cruise performance without modifications to existing cowling. This makes it an ideal option for most float operators given it retains the single exhaust outlet.
The Vy Engine+ Upgrade provides the best rate of climb of all PT6 engine options, making it ideal for sky dive companies, freighters and other operators that frequently encounter inclement weather, and aerial survey groups seeking to avoid exhaust signatures.
Multiply your power and revenue generation capability with a factory-new XP140 Engine+ Upgrade and experience serious return on investment. Blackhawk makes it easy with a quick two-week, ultra-cost-effective installation that delivers power and performance unattainable until now.
Blackhawkdoes not perform installations. Although the installation isbasically an engine change and can be done by any Pratt & WhitneyCanada certified facility, we have found that you will save time andmoney if the upgrade is performed by any of our approved installationfacilities worldwide. These facilities have the experience tocomplete the upgrade faster and with the higher exacting quality youdemand.
To date, nearly every Blackhawk powered aircraft that has been resold within 500 hours of the upgrade has sold close to or higher than the combined investment of the airframe and engine(s). Resale value of Blackhawk powered aircraft remains strong in all markets. Many dealers are even speculating on Blackhawk powered aircraft.
Pratt & Whitney Canada (PW&C) offers an engine credit for every hour remaining to the factory TBO. To qualify, the core engine must have enough cycles on the life-limited components to make TBO and all records supporting the component times and cycles must be present and submitted.Waiting until TBO risks the possibility of a core engine problem, resulting in additional core charges from PW&C. Also, prices from P&WC increase every year, so waiting two or three years would mean a higher investment without any of the time-remaining credit.
Blackhawkoffers transformative performance without the risks of buying new:Will you be able to sell your aircraft for the value you expect? Willthere be unexpected costs to acquire your new aircraft? Will there beunexpected issues not uncovered by the pre-buy? Upgrading withBlackhawk eliminates uncertainty and the transactional costs ofbuying another aircraft while transforming the performance andutility of the aircraft you know best.
We upgraded both of the Grand Caravans to the MT 5-blade propeller this winter, and its been an absolute game changer for us. Quicker load times, so lower fuel consumption, and of course much less noise! I am so impressed that I have ordered an MT propeller for FOXY as well!
There's something cool about sitting in a Cessna Caravan. It's big and really high up but feels in so many ways like a smaller airplane, which was the idea that Cessna had when it launched the model in the early 1980s. It's a study in contradictions, from its oversized 182-style trim wheel next to your knee to the cargo area that could accommodate the better part of an NBA team. No two ways about it: The airplane gives you a feeling of perspective and command that a 182 never could.
That's the feeling I always get when I climb into the Caravan, and that's the feeling I had as I sat in one on the ramp at San Marcos, Texas, getting ready to go flying with Blackhawk's Bob Kromer. Bob's goal was to show me the big difference between this Grand Caravan and, well, this same Caravan a couple of months prior before it had gotten an engine transplant. In this case, the new powerplant was the Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140, an 867 shp monster that would surely do new things for this old bird. I looked forward to the demonstration of raw power.
When it comes to power, the old credo that "more is better" sounds good to all of us, but the truth is, and we should have learned this from reading Goldilocks when we were kids, more is better only when it's not too much more, only when it's just right.
The Cessna Grand Caravan is an airplane that outwardly seems to exemplify excess. Even at the start, the Grand version was an exercise in grandiosity. Shortly after it launched the Caravan model, Cessna did nothing less than take its already plus-sized turboprop single and grow it into something even bigger, with a more powerful engine and a stretched fuselage that made one wonder if at any moment it might tip over on its tail.
We've all gotten used to the look of the Grand Caravan because it's such a common airplane---the original, non-Grand, short-bodied model is the one that looks odd to us these days. The other big reason we've accepted the Caravan's ungainly looks is that we know what it can do. It can haul a prodigious load of people and/or packages in and out of just about any strip you can imagine at reasonable speeds in an unpressurized cockpit with fixed gear at remarkably low operating costs.
The other critical thing to note is that the Cessna Caravan flies like a big Cessna Skylane. Before I flew a 208B for the first time 15 years ago or so, a few different people familiar with the breed told me exactly that, that flying the 208B would feel very familiar. I didn't believe a word of it, and when I finally flew the big bird, I remember thinking to myself, "This flies like a big 182," as though I'd come up with the notion on my own, so unlikely was it that Cessna could have pulled off such a miracle of aero-engineering to make a giant version of one of its legendary fixed-gear, high-wing, all-metal singles, despite its dimensions and heft, fly just like they did.
On the side of the argument that even more power would be better, for years folks have been asking for just that, thinking that the 600 shp and 675 shp versions were underpowered. Turns out that the idea was a popular one. Just a couple of years ago, Cessna certified its latest Caravan, the Grand Caravan EX, which sports an 867 shp Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140 turboprop. I flew it shortly before it was certificated, and it was clear that the additional power did wonders for an already wondrous machine.
Still, at a sticker price of better than $2.5 million, the Grand Caravan EX is a heady investment. Knowing just that and understanding that an aftermarket version could generate a lot of interest, the folks at Blackhawk went to work certifying a version on existing Grand Caravans.
Blackhawk got the STC for the installation of the big engine earlier this year. It can be performed on every model 208 and 208B with the PT6A-114 (600 shp) or PT6A-114A (675 shp) engines. The STC can be done on airplanes that came prior to the adoption by Cessna of the Garmin G1000 avionics suite in the Caravan---the engine-monitoring equipment is built into the G1000, which would require a new software package from the avionics supplier, which hasn't yet happened. The -140 engine produces its 867 shp at 2,397 ft./lbs. of torque and 1900 rpm, which is loafing by this engine's standards, even given the higher power output. This results in a TBO of 3,600 hours, with a hot section inspection recommended every 1,800 hours.
The installation, as with everything Blackhawk does, is a thing of beauty. The company helps keep costs down by reusing the original cowling and exhaust system, modifying it slightly and routing the exhaust through a single pipe.
Up front is a new prop, too, a giant (106-inch-diameter) three-blader from Hartzell, which makes the Blackhawk model purr. Hartzell is said to be working on a four-blade prop for the PT6A-140 that will make it compliant with Europe's stringent noise regulations. The upgrade also includes a more powerful (325 amp) starter-generator that helps keep engine temps down and spool-up times quick. There's also a new, larger-capacity oil cooler, and inside the cockpit, a new array of Howell engine gauges, the round-dial analog kind, that neatly organize the engine-monitoring instruments. The whole upgrade adds around 120 pounds to the Caravan, with the bulk of that added weight owing to the beefier starter-generator and oil cooler. The max weight of the aircraft remains the same.
The economics of the swap are what make it work for Blackhawk (and its customers), as the owner of an existing candidate Caravan can get all the performance of a new 208 EX at a discount of about a million bucks.
That said, a factory-new Caravan EX brings certain things to the table that the Blackhawk model can't, like that new airplane smell or the addition of the G1000 avionics. Then again, these are features that not every Caravan operator wants. Many of the customers for the exchange, Kromer told me, are operators in extremely remote locations (think South America and Indonesia), who need to get in and out of small strips at high elevations with big payloads. The extra power is what matters most to this kind of operator.
The economics typically look like this. The exchange program winds up costing around $620,000, including the installation, when figured at $10,000. The real incentive, as the few businesses like Blackhawk that specialize in turbine engine exchange programs know, is to not have your current timed-out engine overhauled and trade it in toward the more powerful engine. After all, if you're going to be spending a couple hundred grand on a PT6 overhaul anyway, that effectively cuts the cost of the Blackhawk program by that amount. Plus, you get an exchange credit for your old PT6A-114, with more of a credit the more time the engine has until its TBO. While it's a substantial amount of money, the economics of it will prove tempting to a lot of Caravan owners, who will doubtless see this as a path to a higher-powered 208B with performance benefits galore.
To check out just how good the performance of the newly re-engined Caravan would be, Kromer and I went flying in it. The airplane we flew was a 10-year-old 208B with a cargo pod. It has around 3500 hours total time, and it was clearly not a new airplane, though it was in nice shape overall. The new engine on it had about 15 hours of use. It was clearly new.
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