Engines

With Continental Motors tilting strongly toward aerodiesels as a growth strategy, CEO Rhett Ross says hes less convinced that mogas will play a major role in the aviation fuels market. In this podcast recorded this week at AirVenture 2013, Ross said Continental will remain committed to gasoline engines, especially its successful line of large displacement […]

“The U.S. has plenty of natural gas,” said Aviat CEO Stu Horn on Wednesday morning at EAA AirVenture, as he showed off a blue-and-white Husky taildragger with a new belly-mounted fuel tank that carries compressed natural gas to fuel the engine. “This airplane has redundant systems, so you can use either CNG or aviation fuel,” […]

Moving the general aviation fleet off of 100LL and onto an unleaded fuel will bring positive changes and features to powerplants that pilots will want, Lycoming’s Michael Kraft said Wednesday at AirVenture. The company says moving from leaded fuel would unlock the full feature set of its iE-2 FADEC engine for the GA market in […]

Continental Motors is apparently wasting little time in investing in improvements to increase TBRs and gearbox replacement intervals on the Centurion diesel line. With its deal to acquire the former assets of Thielert Aircraft Engines not even two weeks old, Continental said this week at AirVenture that it will field an improved gearbox for the […]

Sonex has announced it is accepting $10,000 deposits for its SubSonex Personal Jet, saying it expects deliveries of the $125,000 “ultra-quick build kits” (a price set for the first 10 depositors) to begin as early as mid-year, 2014, depending on demand. The SubSonex is a single-seat aircraft powered by the PBS TJ-100 turbojet, which produces […]

Although Continental’s purchase of Thielert Aircraft Engines has gained most of the attention, Continental continues development of its homegrown diesel, the four-cylinder TD300. On the way to AirVenture, AVWeb stopped at Continental’s Fairhope, Alabama facility to get a look at work on the TD300. In this video, Continental’s James Ray describes some of the improvements […]

If there’s any overused word at an AirVenture press conference, it’s “excited.” The second most overused word to the point of cliche is “game changer.” Considering that the last real game changer in aviation was, I dunno, the invention of the turbojet engine maybe, a clever new app with drop shadow shading and redesigned pulldown […]

Continentals purchase this week of the assets of Thielert Aircraft Engine GmbH didnt exactly come out of left field. Continental already declared its interest in diesel in 2010, when it announced the TD300 diesel. And that was before China-based AVIC International came into the picture with a necessarily global view, but not one that Continental […]

If Continental Motors ever had any doubts about the aerodiesel market, it erased them in the stroke of a pen with the companys acquisition of the bankrupt assets of Thielert aircraft Engines GmbH. Despite a rocky ending for Thielert culminating in the jailing of its founder, Thielert (and Diamond) put aircraft diesels on the map […]

Continental Motors announced today that it has bought the bankrupt assets of Thielert Aircraft Engines for an undisclosed sum. The deal has been in the works for several months and overnight makes Continental the volume leader in aircraft diesel manufacture. Continental and its parent, the China-based AVIC International, said that the management of Thielert would […]