I have owned and operated a Queenair for ten years and spent many hundreds of hours flying it up north. I have treated it like "tinpis" said like a bucket of nitro-glycerine and got full life out of my engines.
Smooth and planned power reduction is the key to long engine life and i have never babied it on take offs either, pushing 48 inches every time reducing it to 45 only with the gear cuming up. It is good to know you have every horsepower there when you need it. Never beleived in reduced power take off in a piston.

The only failure I had with a PA31 turbocharger was the turbo outlet pipe retainer fell off
Loud bang...**** pants... :ooh:

Nomad true...but after about 1 minute or so the temps will be heading upwards again...by 3 minutes they will be REALLY going up. If operating with a JPI or similar I would suggest 1 minute or when the temps start climbing shut everything down.

I suspect people took the general rule of about a minute to stabilise temps/reducing turbo impeller RPM and figured if I minute was good 3 was better. They misunderstood stabilising for cooling and a new 'old wives tale' was born.

CC - agreed. I was just having visions of people doing what one guy up here does. Flying a 404 around with no warming up - just blasting off and then swinging into the parking bay after landing and killing the mixtures as soon as the wheels stop rolling! And they wonder why they have to pull the cowlings off after every flight to fix things... :hmm:

My 10 cents
 

1. If the aircraft belongs to someone else - do what they want.

2. If the aircraft belongs to you - do some reading that is based on facts. This might be a good place to start.

cheers,

Nivo

Speaking of "this" did anyone go to the engine management course CPAA flew John Deakin & Co. to Australia for or has anyone done their online course?

At the end of the day the objective of the exercise with any aircraft is to get the engine or engine's through to their TBO, without having to pull cylinders off, change exhaust valves or repair crankcases etc.

Over many years of working in the industry, I have seen people try and save a quid on fuel by leaning engines incorrectly only to wonder why at the next 100 hourly they have to change a cylinder, don't start me on reduced power take-offs just think about the C402 at Essendon, likewise some operators can get full life out GTSIO's in C421 or C404 yet other operators aircraft spend most of their life in the hangar with engine dramas.

Many pilots love myths and quickly adopt them as facts. Shock cooling myths endure the longest. Makes you wonder why flying through rain does not cause immediate cracking of cylinders due uneven cooling. After all, rain and slipstream chill factor really lowers the water temperature hitting the cylinders which in turn results in uneven surface cooling at a rapid rate yet we don't have piston engine singles and twins falling out of the sky.

Centaurus
 

You do have a point there, but with a prop spinning 2400 rpm in front of your cylinders i do not think there will be many raindrops actually hitting the pots....
Just a thought....
Anyone care to correct me?

Some got through on this flight :ooh:

Too Much Water...........slight drift....
 

"The DC-3s we were flying at that time were fitted with Wright Cyclone engines. These engines had a characteristic of stopping in torrential rain which we frequently encountered over the Coral Sea; a frightening experience, especially as we carried no survival equipment.

Fortunately they would regain power as we descended to lower levels. It was quite some time before we discovered the cause of this phenomenon.

Apparently there was so much water being drawn into the carburettor air intake that the engines couldn't handle it, so by selecting hot air which was normally used for carburettor de-icing we could overcome the problem.

The Pratt and Whitney, which was the optional engine for these aircraft, did not have that problem but we found them to be less reliable in the conditions under which we operated."

From Peter Yule's "The Forgotten Giant Of Australian Aviation" -
The Story of A.N.A.

Not that I have ever had the pleasure, but I was under the impression that DC-3 pilots LOVED the P&Ws over the Wrights.......

Anyhow....thats rain too!

G'Day 'Tin',
That too sounds familiar, like I think I have read that somewhere. Source?

I wonder how rain like that would affect today's 'Contis' or Lycomings?
I have flown both types through what I thought was 'heavy' rain (Obviously not as heavy as above) at times - short bursts only - with no noticeable effect.

Cheers:ok:

Ex FSO GRIFFO sorry I didnt add a source its in the Pixie reunion thread among stories
As far as Contis go I sure soaked a Baron a few times while based in Daru in the Western districts without a hiccup
Solid IMC pissing pick-handles Daru -POM was a normal.
Im sure a P&W if you could supply it with fuel, would run underwater :ok:

The smaller 1340/985 used to sometimes get water into the harness around the front, caused them to wobble a bit. Never had it from rain, usually in the pub in front of the fire by then.

Pressure washer would do it if you weren't careful and because it's in sealed (?) alloy tubes once it got in it took for ever to dry out.

I flew many hours in the RAAF Convair 440 Metropolitan's. One of them (A96-313) was not equipped with weather avoidance radar and we experienced occasional problems with Cb penetrations. On at least one occasion the cylinder heads temps dropped right back and this was caused by heavy rain. I don't recall servicing problems with cylinders caused by lots of water entering the cowls, although we sure had ignition harness problems. Also significant spark plug fouling caused by 115/145 octane fuel which caused leading up with prolonged ground operation. Couple of impressive start up fires too.

Why did ANA have Wright Cyclones in their DC-3s? Because Ivan Holyman bought a hangar full of them from the Yanks towards the end of the Second World War and converted the whole fleet. (The surviving VH-ABR case in point.)

Incidentally, Ivan was, from various accounts, at times a silly old git. Too stingy, he refused to fit wipers on the RH windscreen causing the pilots to threaten a stoppage. Another time he issued an ops memo to all aircrew saying he would not tolerate the use of obscene shorthand in maintenance logs. (Thought U/S stood in pilot parlance for up the ****!) Source: "Outback Airman" by Harry Purvis. Harry was one of Holyman's prewar pilots and a founder of the union that preceded the AFAP.

Only ever did two POM-Daru runs Tinpis but both times it was the above somewhere along the way!:eek:

Always seemed claggy around Kikori/Kuri though.