7 ms·

I find it crazy that GA piston planes aren't using more modern engines with FADEC and turbo-charged as a matter of fact. The 1960s engine situation with GA plan

I find it crazy that GA piston planes aren't using more modern engines with FADEC and turbo-charged as a matter of fact. The 1960s engine situation with GA planes is crazy to me. Having to care about carb ice, fuel mixture, and low performance ceilings in 2023 is mind boggling. Sure there's planes that have modern powerplants but they're expensive and plenty of new planes are built without any of this stuff included as a requirement for certification.

snakeyjake 3y ago
The cost of certifying new engines is high, which discourages advancement. Even more discouraging is the extremely backwards way of thinking that the old farts in GA have. There is nothing that the barnacles who cling to the walls of the FBO hate more than change, and they're the ones buying stuff.
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  But it's crazy that people die left and right like flies. The fricking SVP of the AOPA who was narrating videos on GA accident reviews... died in a GA accident 2 months ago. In other high risks sports, people tend to blame lack of skills over hardware failure for being the primary cause of accidents (scuba diving, climbing, sailing - all tend to blame improper skill over equipment). But in GA... very safety minded people like Richard McSpadden Jr. die _because_ of the hardware, as far as I'm concerned. It's a crazy situation.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Aviation tends to refuse to blame accidents on skill alone. You can't compare it directly with other activities.
  - nradov 3y ago
    I do a lot of scuba diving and have read many incident reports. While improper skills are usually the primary cause, equipment is usually a contributing factor. Not so much equipment failures but just bringing equipment that is poorly designed or unsuitable for the conditions. Most of that equipment selection problem can be traced back to poor quality instruction and conflicts of interest in the industry. Unlike flying, there is no legal licensing process for diving. Training is mostly handled by a few different private agencies which set course curricula and certify instructors. Some agencies have minimal quality standards and will give an instructor card to almost anyone. And then most training courses are run by dive shops which also sell equipment, so instructors are pressured to not criticize anything the shop sells even when it's total garbage.
- sidlls 3y ago
  There is also a demand issue aside from change-hating curmudgeons. There simply isn't a large enough market for GA planes for companies to justify the cost of research and development, and even though planes aren't cheap GA plane purchasers can still be fairly cost sensitive.
  - AYBABTME 3y ago
    The regulator is to blame if certification is so expensive that old tech is left around to kill people.
    - sidlls 3y ago
      This isn't (just) a regulator issue: it's a market issue. There just aren't many new engines produced every year, because there isn't demand for it. Owning an airplane is expensive, even on the lowest GA end. It's a hobby for the affluent and wealthy. The market just isn't that big. On the extreme side--private jets for the ultra-wealthy--it may be different (I wouldn't know; I'm a lowly 7-figure net worther, barely "rich" by this standard, and owning a private multi-engine jet is well beyond my means).
      - AYBABTME 3y ago
        I think the market is shrinking because the prices are going up because innovation is impossible (compared to alternative transportation tech) because of insane certification costs which creates a reinforced monopoly on existing players and erodes incentives to change and improve. The market ossifies, costs keep going up and so demand keeps shrinking. It's a feedback loop that ends with the annihilation of GA. The regulatory agency is suffocating the segment.
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        It's not the 'certification cost' that is the root problem, it's the liability cost of an accident, which will only ever increase in the future. The 'certification cost' is just the threshold at which the FAA is fine with all the liability being offloaded on to them, for engines made and maintained to spec at least. i.e. For this cost to actually decrease would require an entirely different society, one that doesn't settle things through the judicial/administrative system whatsoever. But then costs may increase somewhere else.
maxcan 3y ago
Agreed, but here is a great explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k1TQGK3mZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k1TQGK3mZI
sidlls 3y ago
What's amusing to me is the juxtaposition of this old tech in the engines vs. the sophisticated avionics and surface controls in these aircraft. The Cirrus aircraft I fly have advanced garmin avionics, including terrain maps, airspace maps, ADS-B integrations, GPS navigation, autopilot, etc. Yet there I sit, fiddling with mixture, ensuring alternate/backup inputs are available in case something goes awry, and dealing with dumb non-linear responses in the throttle because the engine is using tech that's literally decades old and hasn't changed (much) in the last 50 years. There's an upside to this, I guess: I have a number of levers (literally) to pull if something is out of whack, and it creates a kind of weird redundancy/safeguard system to manage various failures. On the other hand, because all these things have to work together, it's entirely possible for weird failure modes to occur that cascade/build on each other unrecoverably. I can't wait to get my hands on the new jet powered plane coming to the club I fly with.
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  My litmus test is this: in 1960/70/80, it wasn't uncommon for a car to break down in the middle of a road trip, and to hear horror stories of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Cars were more hackable but they also weren't reliable at all. Nowadays cars just work, for the most part. GA engines should be the same.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    My experience is that GA engines also “just work”, particularly if you reference them back to the automobile equivalent of total motive energy produced per mid-trip breakdown. My airplane makes about 225 horsepower during cruise flight, for 3-4 hours on a typical leg. My car makes 25-30 horsepower in cruise. Take the airplane engine that has done 1950 hours of weight-off-wheels time so far (including some takeoff/climb, but also some descent), turn that into x8 the auto hours and give an average speed of 40 mph and you get an implied 600K miles worth of total cumulative motive energy produced. Most cars will need significant maintenance on the road to 600K miles or on their way to 2000 hours of operation at 75% of rated power (as do airplanes on their way to 2000+ hours of operation, of course). Airplane engines are quite reliable. As easy to operate as a modern auto? No, but I’m not sure they need to be that easy, since pilot training and certification is quite a bit more rigorous than it is for autos.
filleokus 3y ago
Kinda related: "The $20 an hour Cessna 172 experiment (2020)" [0] with an 2022 update [1] > I wondered if the same process could work for aircraft engines, and began the experiment of designing and modifying a V8 aluminum marine engine to meet FAA Part 23 and 33 requirements, then install it onto a Cessna 172 airframe [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728405 [1]: https://airfactsjournal.com/2022/10/the-20-hour-cessna-172-experiment-update/ https://airfactsjournal.com/2022/10/the-20-hour-cessna-172-e...
snthd 3y ago
They still burn leaded fuel.

snakeyjake 3y ago

The cost of certifying new engines is high, which discourages advancement. Even more discouraging is the extremely backwards way of thinking that the old farts in GA have. There is nothing that the barnacles who cling to the walls of the FBO hate more than change, and they're the ones buying stuff.

AYBABTME 3y ago
But it's crazy that people die left and right like flies. The fricking SVP of the AOPA who was narrating videos on GA accident reviews... died in a GA accident 2 months ago. In other high risks sports, people tend to blame lack of skills over hardware failure for being the primary cause of accidents (scuba diving, climbing, sailing - all tend to blame improper skill over equipment). But in GA... very safety minded people like Richard McSpadden Jr. die _because_ of the hardware, as far as I'm concerned. It's a crazy situation.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Aviation tends to refuse to blame accidents on skill alone. You can't compare it directly with other activities.
- nradov 3y ago
  I do a lot of scuba diving and have read many incident reports. While improper skills are usually the primary cause, equipment is usually a contributing factor. Not so much equipment failures but just bringing equipment that is poorly designed or unsuitable for the conditions. Most of that equipment selection problem can be traced back to poor quality instruction and conflicts of interest in the industry. Unlike flying, there is no legal licensing process for diving. Training is mostly handled by a few different private agencies which set course curricula and certify instructors. Some agencies have minimal quality standards and will give an instructor card to almost anyone. And then most training courses are run by dive shops which also sell equipment, so instructors are pressured to not criticize anything the shop sells even when it's total garbage.
sidlls 3y ago
There is also a demand issue aside from change-hating curmudgeons. There simply isn't a large enough market for GA planes for companies to justify the cost of research and development, and even though planes aren't cheap GA plane purchasers can still be fairly cost sensitive.
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  The regulator is to blame if certification is so expensive that old tech is left around to kill people.
  - sidlls 3y ago
    This isn't (just) a regulator issue: it's a market issue. There just aren't many new engines produced every year, because there isn't demand for it. Owning an airplane is expensive, even on the lowest GA end. It's a hobby for the affluent and wealthy. The market just isn't that big. On the extreme side--private jets for the ultra-wealthy--it may be different (I wouldn't know; I'm a lowly 7-figure net worther, barely "rich" by this standard, and owning a private multi-engine jet is well beyond my means).
    - AYBABTME 3y ago
      I think the market is shrinking because the prices are going up because innovation is impossible (compared to alternative transportation tech) because of insane certification costs which creates a reinforced monopoly on existing players and erodes incentives to change and improve. The market ossifies, costs keep going up and so demand keeps shrinking. It's a feedback loop that ends with the annihilation of GA. The regulatory agency is suffocating the segment.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        It's not the 'certification cost' that is the root problem, it's the liability cost of an accident, which will only ever increase in the future. The 'certification cost' is just the threshold at which the FAA is fine with all the liability being offloaded on to them, for engines made and maintained to spec at least. i.e. For this cost to actually decrease would require an entirely different society, one that doesn't settle things through the judicial/administrative system whatsoever. But then costs may increase somewhere else.

maxcan 3y ago

Agreed, but here is a great explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k1TQGK3mZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k1TQGK3mZI

sidlls 3y ago

What's amusing to me is the juxtaposition of this old tech in the engines vs. the sophisticated avionics and surface controls in these aircraft. The Cirrus aircraft I fly have advanced garmin avionics, including terrain maps, airspace maps, ADS-B integrations, GPS navigation, autopilot, etc. Yet there I sit, fiddling with mixture, ensuring alternate/backup inputs are available in case something goes awry, and dealing with dumb non-linear responses in the throttle because the engine is using tech that's literally decades old and hasn't changed (much) in the last 50 years. There's an upside to this, I guess: I have a number of levers (literally) to pull if something is out of whack, and it creates a kind of weird redundancy/safeguard system to manage various failures. On the other hand, because all these things have to work together, it's entirely possible for weird failure modes to occur that cascade/build on each other unrecoverably. I can't wait to get my hands on the new jet powered plane coming to the club I fly with.

AYBABTME 3y ago
My litmus test is this: in 1960/70/80, it wasn't uncommon for a car to break down in the middle of a road trip, and to hear horror stories of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Cars were more hackable but they also weren't reliable at all. Nowadays cars just work, for the most part. GA engines should be the same.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  My experience is that GA engines also “just work”, particularly if you reference them back to the automobile equivalent of total motive energy produced per mid-trip breakdown. My airplane makes about 225 horsepower during cruise flight, for 3-4 hours on a typical leg. My car makes 25-30 horsepower in cruise. Take the airplane engine that has done 1950 hours of weight-off-wheels time so far (including some takeoff/climb, but also some descent), turn that into x8 the auto hours and give an average speed of 40 mph and you get an implied 600K miles worth of total cumulative motive energy produced. Most cars will need significant maintenance on the road to 600K miles or on their way to 2000 hours of operation at 75% of rated power (as do airplanes on their way to 2000+ hours of operation, of course). Airplane engines are quite reliable. As easy to operate as a modern auto? No, but I’m not sure they need to be that easy, since pilot training and certification is quite a bit more rigorous than it is for autos.

filleokus 3y ago

Kinda related: "The $20 an hour Cessna 172 experiment (2020)" [0] with an 2022 update [1] > I wondered if the same process could work for aircraft engines, and began the experiment of designing and modifying a V8 aluminum marine engine to meet FAA Part 23 and 33 requirements, then install it onto a Cessna 172 airframe [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728405 [1]: https://airfactsjournal.com/2022/10/the-20-hour-cessna-172-experiment-update/ https://airfactsjournal.com/2022/10/the-20-hour-cessna-172-e...

snthd 3y ago

They still burn leaded fuel.