Modifying airplanes that the original manufacturer got almost right has been a constant in general aviation. But lately, we call it something different: remanufacturing. And if any company is the Alpha dog of this process, its Cleveland-based Nextant Aerospace, which has had impressive success remanufacturing Beechjet 400As. Now its poised to repeat the trick with the popular King Air C90 series.
If Pratt & Whitney doesnt quite own the low- and mid-power turboprop market, it at least has a long-term lease at rent-controlled prices. GE Aviation plans to challenge that primacy and the instrument of their run at PW will be the H-series engines of the sort Nextant is using. GE is the giant in transport-category turbofan engines and in a tiny little Czech Republic company, Walter Aircraft Engines, it found a contender. Walter began life in…
In the November 2015 issue of Aviation Consumer, we reported on Continental Motors acquisition of competitor and aftermarket supplier ECi, a buy which eliminated the aftermarket Titan cylinder line.While Continental admitted that it wouldnt retain many of ECis products, it also said it was considering a corrosion treatment for its existing line of factory cylinders, and now follows through with the NiC3 line.
For most owners, the exhaust system is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind portion of the airplane. Its certainly not a sexy part of any aircraft-even the FAAs description of the exhaust system in its Airframe and Powerplant Mechanics Powerplant Handbook is a little off-putting: …a scavenging system that collects and disposes of the high-temperature, noxious gases as they are discharged by the engine. Nevertheless, all exhaust systems deserve a great deal of respect and your attention and consideration because they live in a horrible environment of intense heat, flame, corrosive gases and vibration. Plus, if any component fails, the risks are nothing short of serious: carbon monoxide poisoning of the aircraft occupants, partial or total engine power loss and fire.
After years of developing and manufacturing speed mods for Piper aircraft, Robin Thomas started Power Flow Systems (www.powerflowsystems.com) with the intent of using automotive technology to design tuned exhaust systems for aircraft. To accomplish this, Power Flow says it customizes the exhaust tube for each cylinder so its length-from cylinder to the collector where the tubes join-causes the low pressure traveling down the tube behind an exhaust puff to reach the collector in time to suck out the exhaust from the next cylinder.
In 1995, following 10 years of running a company that performed aircraft exhaust system repairs, Dane Wagner opened Leading Edge Exhaust Systems (LEES) (www.wemakeyoufly.com), in Anchorage, Alaska. He was determined to build aircraft exhaust systems that were not only of higher quality and more robust than OEM equipment but that would allow the engine to develop more power. Having experience with the needs of the Alaska bush operators, he targeted their airplanes of choice, the…
Our latest cylinder survey yielded similar results as it did when we ran it in 2012. Again, Lycoming factory cylinders rated impressively we’ll with our respondents-60 percent said they were happy, while another 28 percent were satisfied with them.
A reader flagged me down in the UAS-dominant Innovations building at AirVenture last month and asked when Aviation Consumer was going to take the lead in protesting the operation of recreational and commercial drones that were on display. This guy was convinced that a midair with that drone over in the corner with the flashing lights and integrated GoPro (pointing to a DJI Phantom quadcopter on display) was going to take him and his Comanche down in the rural Iowa skies. After offering a polite deal with it, dude-these things arent going away, I pointed him to Mike Glasgow, who was manning the Lockheed Martin Flight Services booth strategically colocated in the UAS exhibition area.
Our editors choice awards are all about innovation and value. As we look back at the last 12 issues of Aviation Consumer, we find no shortage of credible products, especially in the ADS-B and aircraft consumable markets. But no single product or company stood out for being the most innovative.So to keep our high standards in check, we wont hand out an award for product or company of the year. Instead, we’ll present a combination of a dozen products and companies that we believe deserve equal recognition for being the best of the best.
At Lycoming, executives roll their eyes when they hear Lycosaurus used to describe the lack of innovation in aircraft power plants. That suggests that the market hungers for engine innovation, but the reality is something different, as Rotax discovered in 2006.
While companies are defined by what they make, what they decide not to make can be just as distinguishing as the product catalog. And that would be the case with Rotax, the Austrian engine giant that all but owns the light-sport engine market. But a decade ago, flush with success, Rotax drew back from an expensive project to take on Lycoming and Continental with its own six-cylinder engine.
Although Continental gets most of the ink in coverage of aerodiesels, Lycoming has a thumb in the market, too, with the DEL 120. This project seemed to come out of the shadows reluctantly because its emergence is associated with the General Atomics Predator, the most widely used reconnaissance and weaponized drone. The Predator originally had the then-Thielert Centurion diesel, but when Thielert got into financial trouble, General Atomics sought other options.
