Nice Display
flyvans.com said:
just a word of caution...
>product looks very interesting & promising
>had a promising chat with the CTO, Gordon Anderson
>apparently customer service / marketing is not their priority.
>missing current updates on the web page.
>time will tell...
cjensen said:
>they had a great display
>plenty of people there to answer questions
>i have had pretty good luck with email correspondence
>i feel pretty confident in these guys.
>i do agree that there website needs some updating!
I am going to wait until they have several hundred flying 1000's of hours, with known performance and economy numbers. A nice airshow display does not do it for me. The reduction unit with hydraulic prop capability looks interesting and works well, but for $7,000 it should look good.
"Looks interesting" and "feel pretty confident" is not flying a plane with real data. I see they have a flight test plane (Piper Arrow III), but NO performance numbers (almost a year and half ago)? Why? What is the fuel burn? What is the new climb rate, top speed and 8,000? cruise speed. What's the installed weight (Piper Arrow III empty weight before and after the Lycoming IO-360 (200hp) was replaced)? They claim the engine weighs approx the same as a Lycoming? Is that with the 100lbs of extra system stuff (battery, pumps, radiator, PRSU)?
Cost: They call for a price of $31,500 to $35,900 just for the engine? Plus the PSRU $6,950. No mention if that comes with an installation kit (e.g., radiator, etc). The cost, $38,450-$42,850
will be way more than a traditional engine. If it does NOT come with the radiator and other parts (like engine mount) what will they charge for that? Will it fit in a RV?
If they expect to market to experimental aircraft (RV in particular) they will need to have a whole kit like powersport and get the cost down. Even if they have success in certification, and that is a big if, it has no affect on an experimental aircraft builder and pilot, except may be increased cost. The cost they incur will need to be passed onto the customers. The Non-certified clone Lycomings do very well and cost about $5,000 less. Certification does not impress me, but it remains to be seen if they will ever get there. Good luck to them.
The big disappointment to me is the early promise of cheap power alternate engines was going to give experimental aircraft (in the 20 years I have followed it), which has not been realized. As cost of these alternate engines have crept higher and higher and over taken and exceeded the cost of a traditional Lycoming (which keeps going down), they still do not offered any real better performance or economy or both. When an alternate engine fly?s next to a Lycoming and does not perform as well or burns a significant amount more fuel than a Lycoming, I hear excuses and wishful thinking. How can I justify spending 10's of thousands of dollars more for less performance and/or more fuel burn than a well established and understood air-cooled Lycoming (that requires less systems to install and should be more reliabile from a system stand point with mechanical fuel and independant ignition systems, because there are less support systems)? A nice airshow display does not do it for me.
My other big disappointment with alternative engines, is a lack of objectivity and real honest flight test data. No doubt this company has found all the same normal issues a Wankel engine has, noise and fuel economy, in their 1.5 years of flight test. They are using the same Mazda technology as everyone else. There is no reason their results will be different than anyone else (powersport, Real World Solutions, home grown do-it-your-self). Looking at their in-flight picture of the Piper Arrow III it has a huge off center hole in the cowl for cooling. What does that do for drag? An engine does not live on a test stand, it is the engine and the installation that makes the total picture. One of the dirty little secrets of water cooling is the radiator is hard to install with out (dirty) drag. Research in the area of water cooled engines for aircraft stopped after WWII when jets came out. The most successful water cooled aircraft was a V12-Rolls Royce North American P-51. The belly scoop was as low drag as could be made, but when you have a super charged +2,000 HP (piston) engine you can take a little extra drag of a radiator. Water cooling is superior in the world of just the engine, but in the world of engine intallation aircooled has many advantages.
George (would like an alternate but can't find anything that meet my needs that is better than a Lycoming, that does not cost more, is easier to install and maintain, does not weigh more and performs better (speed/fuel burn) than a Lycoming. )
