Engines

Although it has kept its development out of the public eye, Lycoming appears to be much further along in aircraft diesel engine development than many in the industry realize. Using the booming unmanned aircraft sector as a launching pad, Lycoming told us that it has leveraged automotive technology to develop whats essentially a diesel near-equivalent […]

Although a lot of aircraft engines are approved to burn mogas, that doesn’t include many high-compression, high-horspower engines like the Continental IO-520. That’s where the Airplains ADI system comes in. It injects a water/methanol mixture into the induction system to allow the burning of lower-octane auto gas. Here’s a video tour of the system. view […]

Pipistrels sleek Panthera retractable, announced two years ago, will soon have a six-cylinder Lycoming IO-540 rather than the IO-390 originally planned. The engine switch was forced because Lycoming wont be approving the IO-390 for mogas, according to Pipistrel. The IO-540 replacement, which Pipistrel says will improve short-field and high density altitude takeoff performance, will be […]

In the world of military aviation, the piston engine was left for dead sometime in the 1950s and it would still be thus if drones hadnt come along. But piston engines swinging old-school props give unmanned aircraft something that jet engines cant: unrivaled mid-altitude efficiency and endurance. So as unlikely as it seems, drone technology […]

Last week I was on the telephone with Tim Roehl, one of the founders of General Aviation Modifications, Inc., the folks who created the tuned fuel injectors called GAMIjectors. We were talking about a number of things, including Lycomings fairly new IO-390 engine that puts out 210 HP and is getting attenion in the aviation […]

Ive been covering the aviation piston fuel story intensely for four years now and off and on for a lot longer than that. And honestly, the more we bump along toward an eventual replacement for 100LL, the more confusing and confounding the process appears to be. Not that Im discouraged, for there will be a […]

Shells announcement of an unleaded replacement for 100LL last week has drawn lots of attention, deservedly. At this weeks ASTM meeting in Tampa, I spent time buttonholing the worlds fuel experts about what this means for the world of GA. The fuel guys are mostly curious-intensely so-about what formulation Shell has cooked up, but the […]

Does general aviation need new piston engines? Well, sure, it always does, but thats not the same as saying it can sustain new engine designs. Nor does it stop companies from telling the R&D department to push around some ideas. In business in general, we call this progress, while in general aviation, its known as […]

GE is researching whether cold-spray technology can be deployed to build or repair aircraft engine parts and possibly extend the lifespan of those parts (and others) by years or, more optimistically, decades. GE believes that engine parts made by cold-spray processes, also known as 3D painting, will be less expensive to produce and will be […]

In a public submission, the NTSB has told the FAA it does not understand the foreseeable safety benefit of the FAAs proposed action regarding specific parts of the agencys NPRM on ECi cylinder assemblies. As written, the FAAs NRPM would require thousands of aircraft owners to inspect or replace certain ECi engine cylinders. In its […]