Engines

If new aircraft manufacturing ventures require a degree of faith to succeed, Austro Engine GmbH, grafted on to the side of the Diamond Aircraft factory in Wiener Neustadt, Austria must be the industrial equivalent of the Vatican. It’s not that Austro has no chance of success—the reverse may very we’ll be true—but that it’s investing heavily for a future that many in the industry can’t yet draw into sharp focus. The uncertain future of avgas—it seems to be all but dead in Europe and approaching life support in the U.S.—should make diesel engines a natural for strong growth. But with aircraft sales in the tank, that growth has failed to materialize. Gasoline powerplants still outsell diesels by a wide margin and some diesel projects—DeltaHawk, for instance, and Thielert’s slow-as-50-weight-oil life extension efforts, have a forever-over-the-horizon quality. The exception is Austro.

If new aircraft manufacturing ventures require a degree of faith to succeed, Austro Engine GmbH, grafted on to the side of the Diamond Aircraft factory in Wiener Neustadt, Austria must be the industrial equivalent of the Vatican. It’s not that Austro has no chance of success—the reverse may very we’ll be true—but that it’s investing heavily for a future that many in the industry can’t yet draw into sharp focus. The uncertain future of avgas—it seems to be all but dead in Europe and approaching life support in the U.S.—should make diesel engines a natural for strong growth. But with aircraft sales in the tank, that growth has failed to materialize. Gasoline powerplants still outsell diesels by a wide margin and some diesel projects—DeltaHawk, for instance, and Thielert’s slow-as-50-weight-oil life extension efforts, have a forever-over-the-horizon quality. The exception is Austro.

With its 912-series engines, Rotax owns the light sport propulsion market. But even though the 912s are technologically more advanced than the typical Lycoming or Continental engine, buyers have been wondering when Rotax would get around to fuel injection and electronic ignition. In early March, it did just that. At the company’s Gunskirchen, Austria, factory, it rolled out the new 912 iS, an “eco” engine with improved fuel economy, electronic fuel injection and a sophisticated, dual-channel ECU architecture with all the features you’d expect a modern aircraft engine based on automotive technology to have.

Propped up on the assembly bench, aircraft cylinders—regardless of who made them—look almost alike. But they don’t necessarily perform alike, which is why owners contemplating an engine overhaul wring their hands over which jugs to buy. Since the mid-1990s, the cylinder market has waxed and waned with regard to prices, choice and competition. What’s an owner to do? Ask other owners, that’s what. So we recently did just that, surveying nearly 400 owners of piston-powered aircraft about their experiences with cylinders. We also contacted a few shops to query about their recommendations. Curiously, the cylinder market has, shall we say, evened out since the last time we did this survey. We’re not exactly hearing choruses of Kumbaya here, but the schizophrenic spikes in owner bile toward one company or another seemed to have been displaced by a it’s-not-so-bad resignation toward cylinders that go bad now and then.

Next to $5 avgas, the cost of routine engine maintenance and overhauls takes the biggest bite out of the aircraft ownership budget. You can always choose not to paint your airplane or live with ratty seats, but if the engine tanks, you’ve got an 1800-pound radio stack you can’t even use because there’s no way to spin the alternator. Our owner reports on various models consistently confirm what we’ve always known: Some owners spend a lot less on aircraft maintenance simply because they own airplanes equipped with engines we have often considered bulletproof. This concept is, itself, a misnomer. Nothing in aviation is truly bulletproof, but it’s fair to say that some engines have a better service history than others and, conversely, some are simply money pits. That’s not to say they don’t perform, but it’ll cost you more and reliability will suffer.

Everyone wants it to be true; let there be a long-lost secret that reverses aging, cures the flu overnight or squeezes 50 more miles out of every tank of gasoline. Trying fuel additives is rather like buying the occasional lottery ticket. You know the odds tower against you, but what if this one is a winner? When we met Keith Lange at Oshkosh last summer, he enthusiastically offered us two bottles of AeroFusion to test and review. He did so without qualification or condition, and we got the feeling he honestly believed in his product. He sells it with a 100-percent money-back guarantee, which not something you’d do if you expected unhappy customers. We said we’d give it a try.

Everyone wants it to be true; let there be a long-lost secret that reverses aging, cures the flu overnight or squeezes 50 more miles out of every tank of gasoline. Trying fuel additives is rather like buying the occasional lottery ticket. You know the odds tower against you, but what if this one is a winner? When we met Keith Lange at Oshkosh last summer, he enthusiastically offered us two bottles of AeroFusion to test and review. He did so without qualification or condition, and we got the feeling he honestly believed in his product. He sells it with a 100-percent money-back guarantee, which not something you’d do if you expected unhappy customers. We said we’d give it a try.

When Diamond introduced the two-seat Katana to North America in 1995, it might as we’ll have been powered by alien technology. The 81-HP Rotax 912F3 was about as familiar to aircraft mechanics as brain surgery is to a plumber. But all that has changed. Rotax has made serious market inroads and with the advent of light sport aircraft, it has become more familiar to maintenance shops and an overhaul infrastructure has sprouted. In North America, there are two sources for full overhauls. Rotech Research in British Columbia owns the North American territory and in Sebring, Florida, Lockwood Aviation Supply is a Rotech dealer for overhauls.

With the two engine factories fighting field overhaul shops for a piece of an ever-shrinking engine pie, it’s no surprise that the factories are pushing their rebuilt and overhauled engines. They find enough buyers for these services such that rebuild work now constitutes a significant revenue stream for both Lycoming and Continental. Anyone shopping for an overhaul usually gives the factory options at least a cursory look. So how are they doing? To find out, we asked our readers to tell us about their experiences with both Lycoming and Continental factory engines of various kinds.

For many years battery chargers were simple beasts; a heavy transformer to drop the line voltage and a rectifier to change AC to DC made up the bulk of components. Some added a relay to turn on the charger when the voltage fell. Also, some chargers served as battery boosters with a temporary hit of 50 amps or so to nudge a discharged battery into a start. These chargers did a lousy job in terms of battery life and fully charging the battery to its potential (pun intended). Both the RV and boating industries were probably the big drivers in the development of sophisticated, computer-chip-controlled, multi-stage chargers, especially for deep cycle batteries.

In business, its axiomatic that eight of 10 startups fail within three years. In general aviation, if anyone bothered to track them, the odds are probably a little worse. Nonetheless, when Thielert Aircraft Engines GmbH went belly up in the spring of 2008, it was a surprise to many who had been following the company casually. Diamonds innovative DA42 was selling well, the engines seemed to be performing and with avgas threatened, the trend line appeared to point in only one direction: up. Yet in the summer of 2011, the company remains under the bankruptcy protection of German law. But it also continues to operate, delivering both new engines and parts, albeit at high prices.

That not-so-faint hissing sound you hear is us reacting at the slightest suggestion that we are Mac fanboys. We are, if anything, washed-in-the-blood cynics when it comes to the great bloated gust of hype that surrounds everything to do with Apple computers and products. But were also realists and fair to a fault, so when we see practical, meaningful products of any kind, we think the nod is due. So this year, we are naming aviation applications for the iPad as our products of the year. Please just shoot us if we use the phrase “game changer” applied to anything, most of all a computer. We prefer to think of the iPad and the dozens of useful aviations apps it has spawned as a substantial and useful contribution to cockpit information management.