boffc130

I used to fly the C-208B in freight operations IRL many years ago. During training while empty, the plane did want to leap off of the runway at or near rotation speed, as best as I can recall. And of course while empty it would accelerate quickly and the flaps could be retracted fully with no worry about sinking. With a full payload, and depending on where the center of gravity ended up, I had to be focussed during the take-off roll because it would be different every time (especially if my assumption for the trim position was not perfect). Naturally the rotation was fairly mushy unless the center of gravity was aft. But I did take my time to establish climb speed and follow the POH and company rules for flap retraction. As a side note, our determination of CG with a full cargo load was to see how easy it was to remove the tail stand. If you had to put your shoulder into the fuselage to unlatch the tail stand, the CG was pretty far aft. If the stand was not touching or was barely touching the ground and the payload was max, CG was probably too far forward. The sweet spot was when you could push up slightly on the fuselage to remove the tail stand. Telling on myself here: There was one time when I decided to accept the loaded condition even though I really had to do a strong push up on the fuselage to remove the tail stand. The problem with that was, the CG moved aft with fuel burn, so at my next stop I asked the ground crew to install the tail stand before I got out of the cockpit because I didn't want the plane to settle onto the tail! 😮