Oh geez, not the auto tech vs dinosaurs argument again.
Again. And again. So I will rebut.
Problem is, many engine failures occur through no fault of the pilot or AMT. Failed valves, thrown rods, snapped crankshafts and camshafts, cylinder barrel/head separations... those are failures that just shouldn't occur. Some problems might have been detected prior to failure, but many were not apparent until the music stopped.
Catastrophic failures are really rare. You know what usually fails? The magnetos, because they weren't faithfully inspected and maintained every 500 hours like they're supposed to be. So they quit, sometimes in a really bad way such as sending sparks to the wrong cylinders so that the engine nearly dies. The plastic magneto gears were worn and degraded because the mag had 1400 hours on it since it was last apart, and the age and heat did the degrading as well. I have found rusted bearings in a magneto. Just waiting to fail in flight.
Throw rods are due to oil starvation. That's not the engine maker's fault. The pilot didn't check the oil every often at all. Or the owner didn't get those 40-year-old oil cooler hoses replaced every five years like he should, and one failed and dumped all the oil overboard.
I, too, had two failures. The carb fell off the first airplane because the hardware had no locking on it at all. No lockwire, cotter pins, lock washers, nothing. That's not the engine designer's fault. That's the mechanic's. The second was a busted crank, from someone's propstrike that they likely didn't report. The crank cracked, and then broke when I was flying it. The crack was easily seen once we took it apart. More lack of proper maintenance.
Given that the consequences are potentially lethal, our goal should be ZERO inflight failures and any engine failure should be unacceptable. We may acknowledge the fact that a zero failure rate is unachievable, but that should be the goal nonetheless and the engines available today fall far, far short of that. Even non-injury engine failure accidents are expensive to the GA community, and our escalating insurance rates reflect the magnitude of the problem.
Our governments want 100% safety, too. They have 99.999% now, but that last .001% will make aviation too expensive for all of us. It would require much more QA, at every step of maintenance and manufacture, and pilots would need 200 hours for a PPL and 500 for a Commercial and 1000 for IFR....get the idea?
Whether or not we like the characterization, the Continental and Lycoming engines that dominate GA ARE dinosaurs. The engine on a brand new million-dollar Cirrus is a 1950s artifact, kept on life-support by the economic impracticality of producing a modern replacement.
That idea comes from ignorance, They LOOK the same. They are NOT the same. The metallurgy, and many other things, have changed dramatically. I have posted, before, many areas that have been improved in modern engines. As a mechanic I dealt with those improved things all the time. They made my 1946 A-65 look really ancient.
Meanwhile, the technical advancement of automotive engines surpassed that of piston aircraft engines a long, long time ago. As far as I know, there exists no reliable data to directly compare the reliability of GA engines to auto engines, but it’s clear that the reliability of auto engines has steadily and dramatically increased since the 1950s whereas the reliability of piston aircraft engines has not.
Nope. The reliability of a Lycoming is much better than that of an auto engine,
if it's maintained. Most aren't. Not nearly well enough. And most failures, around 90%, are electrical in nature: magnetos versus all the computers and sensors and connections in the modern auto. I have had plenty of electrical troubles in my motor vehicles, and almost none with my magnetos. 1946 magnetos. Look after them and they keep going.
I was the director of maintenance with a flight school. We ran Lycomings all the way to TBO with no issues. Not a single engine failure in maybe 35,000 hours while I was there. They still had compressions in the high 70s, no metal in the filters, and could have been stuck in homebuilts and run another 2000 hours. And these engines were run hard in the flight school, by ham-fisted students.
Aircraft engines are working at 65-100% power almost all the time they're in the air. Auto engines are cruising at 25% power, and almost never get pushed to 100% for more than a few seconds. Like I've said so many times,
aircraft engines are not car engines. That's the mistake most people make. The aircraft engines we have now are doing admirably well considering the performance expected of them.
I’ve not experienced a catastrophic engine failure in a car, ever. I’ve had two in airplanes, one of which left me in a field, a long stroll from civilization—it does tend to change one’s perspective.
See above. Me, too. Many failures such as head separations or cracked pistons are the pilot's fault. Detonation from poor mixture management, or from overboosting, or from just opening that throttle too fast.
and so long as we are willing to buy new airplanes with 1950s engines, we will continue to ride our dinosaurs
Not until you're willing to pay $150K+ for a nice new modern aircraft engine, yes. 12 years ago I did a bunch of work on an SMA diesel in a 182. At that time, SMA had 50 of those engines flying worldwide, and they had spent one billion dollars so far, at that time, on its development and certification. The conversion, in 2009 dollars, was around $100K, to put it in a 182. So of course there are no new piston engines. Nobody will buy them when they're going to cost hundreds of thousands. The safety culture of our society has done this. We sue at the drop of a hat, so the manufacturers have to design idiot-proof stuff, an impossible task, and the governments want flawless perfection, too, and that just drives certification costs out of sight. Unless we start admitting that we cannot have perfection, and are willing to tolerate some risk, we won't see affordable new engines, and even the electric stuff will be expensive after certification. We'll still expect zero-risk performance.
