At the end of the day I really don't care if you run lop. It's your plane unless you hire one then it the wiener that will dictate what to use. However if you think your lame not going to notice well I think you deluding yourself. If you think a lame going to turn a blind eye because you have damaged your engine and he is going to sign it off against the AD ( which is law) and against the manufacturer it's not going to happen. Then depending on how much damage you have done how much fuel saving do you have to do to have that return.
...a-a-a-and here we go again. I'm sure Creampuff and FTDK need a break by now, so I'll weigh in.
Yet again you make unsupported assertions, in the face of many, many explanations to the contrary. But I'll have another go:
- If LOP = engine damage, please explain the mechanism by which it does so. By this I mean, give us the blow-by-blow of what takes place during and after the combustion cycle in order to bring about this damage. APS provides this sort of analysis during their courses. If you are to dispute their data, you need to provide a similar depth of explanation. Simply claiming "it burns valves" or "it damages cylinders" won't suffice.
- LOP operation is not carried out as a means of saving fuel. That's just a happy by-product. The real reason for doing so, is that the engine runs cooler and with less stress.
- Instead of focusing on the engines allegedly damaged by LOP operation, how about looking at the vast majority which weren't? I have personally spoken to one high-time IO-520 operator whose first two engines failed to make TBO, in spite of receiving top overhauls partway through their lives. The third engine went all the way, with no top overhaul. There was only one change in operating practice with that engine. I'll leave you to guess what it was.
If you believe the hype how America airlines extended there engine overhaul life by running lop go find out the original overhaul life for those engines. The hardest part of an engine life is take off. Dose the engine destroy its self of
On takeoff with high temps cylinder pressures and everything thing else they profess. No they don't.
You're not going to get away with that one either. During takeoff those big engines are running well on the rich side of peak; in fact as rich as they will go. And the kind of power they're developing is only allowed for 5 minutes, 10 in emergency. That's hardly representative of the majority of the engine's life.
As to the comparative overhaul lives before and after LOP was instituted, that's well documented. Off the top of my head, I think they went up by a factor of about 10. Of course the operators didn't know they were running LOP at the time, but they were doing so regardless.
With the new instruments that are available everyone is now an expert. However they not.
By your logic, the less we know about what's going on inside our engines, the better off we are. That's just ludicrous. With this sort of data now available, we can get a very accurate correlation of cause and effect, every time we operate the engine. And with a bit of education, we can interpret the information to achieve desired results.
I'm really sorry if you feel this encroaches on your monopoly of knowledge about how engines work. But those of us who fly them have a far greater investment in their reliable operation than anyone who doesn't. It's not adequate for any responsible pilot to regard what's going on ahead of the firewall as some mystical zone, with access to its secrets allowed only to the chosen few.
In this business, as with many others, knowledge is power. Anyone who wants to restrict or constrain that knowledge is derelict in duty at best; dangerously irresponsible at worst.