Bravo73,
I'm just a PPL(H), so excuse my ignorance of aircraft certification. I understand some of the implications as my father spent 30+ years working for P&W.
What order of magnatude are we talking about here for certifying a fuel injected engine? I lurk here but rarely post because I don't have much to add but I'm quite interested in why (besides cost and low volume) that the aviation industry is still using very low tech engines.
Low tech often equals little to go wrong/proven technology. And I gather that most people thought that everything would have been switched to turbine engines long ago (if asked long ago).
Is this simply a case of the industry assuming that there was no future in recipricating engines and stagnating? Or is the certification process overly complicated and costly? (Both maybe?)
The risks for a single engine aircraft engine failure are ofcourse a large consideration, but surely FI engines have been around for several decades and often (at least in the automotive world) are just a different set of cylinder heads and intake manifold (along with pumps, fuel rails etc).
I've never flown an R22, I did my training on a Bell 47 G2, but the same could be said for retrofitting some of these older aircraft (this Bell was upgraded in it's past to a Lycoming 260 HP engine, I don't remember what the original engine was).
Regards,
Mike
Edited for typo and wording.
Last edited by Dolmangar; 7th November 2007 at 13:29.