Recent content by Tusayan

Interesting - I’d only previously heard of Taiwan. There was a Taiwanese built airplane local to me once upon a time, they were PL-1s with the boxy tail cone, but obviously very similar. I noticed it was quite small inside, something like a T-18. I don’t suppose Taiwanese pilot trainees are...

And a pre-existing profit-making industrial base, run and staffed by people who wanted to (and did) put money in their own pockets by being faster than more effective than other bidders. And that extended down several tiers of subcontracting.

My experience leads me to believe that with aerospace innovation and invention, technical and financial risk are mitigated by selling first to the government, initially via funded R&D and then through less demanding production orders.

Probably neither hopes nor dreams. Rotax is a division of Bombardier RECREATIONAL Products, headquartered in Canada and successfully split off in 2003 from the more 'serious' parts of Bombardier that make jet aircraft and mass transit products. Since the 1960s they've operated primarily as the...

Likely because it didn’t climb well without one. In addition to peak power, which is all you need to worry about with a CS prop, with a FP prop an engine needs to have a relatively flat spread of power to reduced RPM to allow good climb for a heavy plane. That characteristic tends to be...

The problem with the Porsche engine was that it was heavy, heavy enough to require a longer fuselage on the Mooney, and despite being smooth and easy to operate offered lower installed performance than the Lycoming. As a result it failed in the marketplace, embarrassing Porsche and damaging...

One difference there is between southern Italian engineering labor rates and US labor rates. About a factor of two.

E-AB aircraft are not certified, either by type or individually. The easiest to find source of data for E-AB aircraft completions in the Vans website, which only reflects one type although its obviously the most popular type right now. About 11,000 Vans RVs have been built and flown and...

The lower price end of US new plane market has for that reason shifted to E-AB aircraft, quite successfully and fully within FAA regulations. The light aircraft market is not at all dysfunctional, it’s just responding to the fact that several generations of aircraft built since 1945 were not...

I was very happy to choose my current plane and buy it for about 3 months of my then-salary in 2010, and I’m still happy to be flying it 14 years later. At the time I thought that it was the best time ever to be buying and flying an aircraft. I’m not so sure that’s the case today, inflation...

The difference is that an open market has created the current situation, driven by choice.

No, there aren't. The low RPM 160 HP version of what is normally a 180 HP engine in parallel valve configuration, or a 200 HP in angle valve configuration, is a specialty engine used for a very specific application. It pays a substantial price in climb and high altitude performance by being...

For fair comparison of performance between with turbo-Rotax gasoline engine that can operate at 100% power for only 5 minutes, you don't pick the Lycoming with the worst power density of any as a result of being de-rated for extreme durability when operated at 100% rated power indefinitely. In...

An IO-360 Lycoming is rated at either 180 HP or 200 HP continuous at sea level, not 160 HP.

I work in the business. It is amazing how a series of bankruptcies and loss of investment can create a situation in which a huge amount of money has been spent in order for people who didn’t fund the development to make a small amount of money. Oddly enough the people making the lost...