Progressive, you have written a very common misconception about LOP operations and just what an APS course is designed to teach.
I do not for one minute blame you for this. I do not blame yr right for having some very strong beliefs that are scientifically incorrect. It is the entire system of education that is to blame. So let me explain, which as you would agree can be difficult in just a post on a forum. You will need to trust my information here. I have no reason to add to misleading myths.
LOP is not a problem when done by the right people with the right equipment. Unfortunately most of the pilot community do not fit into that field. Thus we teach new pilots to fly ROP and the right ones get motivated and go to Jaba's course to learn LOP.
Lean of Peak operations have been around since Charles Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic. I do not think there was any AuRacle or JPI gear on board that flight.
I can teach anyone to fly safely LOP in under 5 minutes, more like 2-3 minutes including a briefing and demonstration. Mid 2013 during the Aust Womens Pilots conference in Hervey Bay, I took Kreisha Ballantyne, the editor from Australian Pilot flying over Fraser Island. I asked her to fly, and we departed YHBA climbed to 1500' and head rougly towards Lake Mackenzie. Once at 1500 and already over water, I gave a briefing on how to do it, with her eyes closed (1-2 seconds) she did it. This was all done and dusted before we reached the Island shores. She nailed it first go. Simple as that, even a girl can do it we joked! We did not need or use anything of the EMS, no lean find functions, nothing more than the human sensor pack and a 1-2 minute briefing. She did it so well I said I guarantee you are around 70-80dF LOP, so we used the EMS to prove this by carefully (for accuracy sake not engine concern) sneaking up on peak from the Lean side to find it. BINGO! Spot on she was.
So, who needs the engine monitor and a massive amount of training by comparison you ask? Simply the ROP pilot. Especially at higher power settings. There is no way possible of knowing without instrumentation where to operate on the Rich side of Peak. That is safely at an appropriate level ROP. Without an EMS you can't tell 200dF ROP from 75dF ROP. The reason most engines survive so long with mixture mismanagement on the rich side is because it mostly happens at low enough powers to not do harm. It is wasteful and filthy on internals, but that is another matter.
To understand this point further, let my describe the story of two pilots, two identical say TNIO550 powered Bonanza's. They take their planes to a diligent and hard working LAME like yr right, 100hrly done and the injectors have been out and cleaned. The LOP pilot specifically asked for this not to be done but the LAME was being thorough and ignored this while the ROP pilot did not care. They both had the same piece of thread from a shop rag inadvertently introduced to an injector during reinstallation (not as uncommon as you think).
The ROP pilot jumps in and blasts off home, full rich and away, running happily, for another 100 hours.
The LOP pilot jumps in climbs out, does a BMP or sets LOP in whichever way he normally does and it runs like a hairy goat. Goes full rich, smooth, back to his normal LOP fuel flow, rough as an outback road after a wet season. He returns to the field and says.....you touched my injectors didn't you!! Sheepishly the LAME says yes, I always do at 100hrly's. Why? Well one of them has a partial blockage and sure enough it does. Problem corrected, LOP pilot blasts off home and all is sweet for another 100 hrs.
The ROP pilot is still blissfully unaware that his turbocharged engine is running with one cylinder in mild to medium detonation for the next 100 hours (provided it does not start a preignition event) because that one cylinder is running around 50 - 75dF ROP most days and the rest full rich at about 250dF.
Neither of these two pilots used engine monitors.....but which one needed one the most?
Simple.
The ROP pilot did.
Myth busted.
It is not to say we condone this at APS, we believe all engines and pilots deserve a good EMS and the education to understand what it is telling you.
So this brings me to the next myth. One of Jaba's courses as it seems to be known, is actually the EXACT same course as developed by Walter Atkinson, George Braly and John Deakin. Two of whom frequent here.
This class spends very little time indeed teaching you how to run LOP. We actually spend more minutes on teach you to run ROP properly. How is that for a myth busting!! What we do is teach understanding of the combustion process from a data backed scientific approach. This is a few hours worth. We teach the effects on these scientific parameters by the pilot via the three control inputs, and you learn to not only read but understand the data from the Dyno. We then transition you to the typical engine monitor. After that we teach a lot of understanding of the myriad of faults that can be diagnosed in flight. Some life threatening ones and others that will save you a fortune in workshop expenses.
We also teach you the pilot how to communicate all this well with the LAME. We also teach you the LAME how to understand your customers and their data files. The last course in Sydney had at least 3 LAME's in the room. I had emails afterwards saying word for word..."where were you 20 years ago when I needed you". This is a great resource for both pilots and LAME's.
Last of all we teach a lot of critical thinking, so both pilots and LAME's can actually read between the lines and the BS that is printed randomly through many manuals. And yes we use real POH's and it is amazing the looks we get in class
and
are typical.
This process takes two and a half days and it is intense, several on pprune have done them in the last year, they will most likely confirm this and why it is impossible to convey it all in a few posts on pprune. If we could we would. And contrary to some opinion, we do not do it for profit. We try to keep it from costing us and possibly we don't. We do it because we enjoy sharing the knowledge and nobody else does.
So
Myth 2 BUSTED!
I will let my keyboard cool off for a minute and come back to assist yr right with some understanding of things. One thing I and Mr Atkinson, Braly, Deakin and Denyer promise is that if someone is actually willing to learn and shows signs of being determined to learn, despite the strongly held beliefs we were all once taught, we will do our best to share the education. This is not at all about being in pi##ing contests.