Power lever...prop lever....condition lever....?

[francesco.doenz]

Is there an easy way to explain what these three levers control each? In a piston engine throttle, prop and mixture levers have obvious and easy to understand mechanical effects and functions, but for the the Pilatus it's quite confusing, the only one which I may understand is the prop lever which I hope controls the pitch of the blades??
May be to answer these questions is too complicated, references are also welcome!!
Many thanks in advance for your inputs!

P.S. I guess idle control lever and condition lever are the same?

[azflyboy]

The power lever is roughly equivalent to the throttle on a piston engine. Moving the power lever tells the fuel metering unit to increase or decrease fuel flow to the engine, which changes how much power it produces. In the beta range, the engine runs at essentially a constant power setting, and the power lever directly controls the propeller pitch to change how much thrust is being produced. When moved to reverse, the power lever simply moves the propeller pitch to produce reverse thrust (the engine and prop still turns the same direction), although past a certain point, it also increases engine RPM to produce more reverse thrust.

The condition lever is somewhat similar to the mixture control on a piston engine, but it only has a few fixed positions. The low and high idle positions basically tell the engine to use different fuel scheduling, with the low idle position running a lower fuel flow to produce less noise, fuel burn, and wear on the engine for ground operations, and the high idle position being the "normal" position that has the engine producing it's full rated horsepower for normal flight. The idle/cutoff position stops all fuel flow to the engine.


The prop lever works in pretty much the same way that it does on a piston engine.

[dizzyflores]

I should add that the condition lever high and low idle are for ground ops only. Once you advance the throttle for flight it will make no difference if you are in low or high idle. Or that was how it was in the C208 I used to fly on.