Well… When you fly frequently you will eventually get to this. Nothing bad happened and there isn’t really a story here but still I feel like sharing.
Today I set out to fly back home to LELL Sabadell from EDFE Egelsbach and after leveling off at FL200 my oil temperature was rising to 200 and climbing and the CHT jumped to 425. During the climb the readings were all pretty normal. So decided not to continue my journey (2:30 left) and do a precautionary landing instead. Called ATC, had to explain what “high CHT” means and got offered several airports. I was overhead Karlsruhe but opted for Stuttgart EDDS instead as it wasn’t far and I know the place and hotel. There wasn’t any immediate issue after throttling back for the descent and I flew the ILS into a busy airport at 160 kts as requested.
ATC reaction was very positive. Each controller asked “do you require any assistance?” and I explained “no, negative emergency, regular approach”. So I got sequenced between the airliners.
Tomorrow I will learn what caused the issue and what needs to be done to my engine. About 250 hours flown since I got it in April 2015. Something had to happen sometime. We’ll see…
Good decision not to continue. And good decision to land at Stuttgart. Lots of airline flights to Barcelona from here in case they can’t fix your engine quickly. I’ll be at the airort staurday morning for a flight with a student in case I can help with anything (flight planning, charts, transportation, whatever).
That was my thinking :-)
Thanks for the offer!
Turned out that my #1 cylinder has bad compression and a lot of oily residue in the cylinder head. It seems that I also lost a bit of MAP via #1 and all that caused the higher temperatures. So it will get pulled, inspected and we’ll see.
Two pictures to illustrate what we’ve found.
You can see #1 to the left:
And here the piece on the right is from #1:
Bummer. Could have been worse. Any idea of the downtime?
Should be flying as early as next Wednesday. It’s my “car” 
Stephan – for you who travel so much with your plane for business, and as you say use it as your car, wouldn’t it be more advantageous to have a DA40/42 or something? I would think that the diesel engines and the Jet A1 prices would save you a lot of money yearly? Obviously a little bit slower than an SR22, but perhaps worth it if the savings are considerable?
In any case, hope the plane gets fixed soon.
Multiple owner reports indicate that the diesel fuel saving is closely balanced by extra maintenance costs…
Probably depends on whether you pay German prices… The maintenance cost of the Austros is much lower than the CD engines. Another thing to take into account is that the TBR of the CD engines was recently raised to 2100 hrs vs 1500 (for the CD-135) previously.
According to a conversation I had with the Diamond dealer for France yesterday at the Paris Air Expo, a lot of thinking went into making field maintenance easier and cheaper when the Austros were designed.
I know what you are talking about, had the same over water in the middle of the med. at 5500’, couldn’t land 
, so pulled the power, went full rich and opened the cowl flaps. Could continue S&L at 3000’ and reduced power.
