A new diesel engine - EPS (Engineered Propulsion Systems) and the Graflight V8 diesel

Cobalt wrote:

The price difference between certified and uncertified identical stuff is ridiculous, and ranges from 2x to 100x for simple spares, with regulators enforcing monopolies and encouraging vendor practice that would be illegal in any other industry.

I’d use the availablity of PMA engine parts from competitive vendors as a counter example. Certainly it’s useful that they are developed on uncertified Experimental category aircraft, one of the intended purposes for that category, but they then become available for certified aircraft engines under FAA PMA. New certified cylinders are as a result on the order of $1100 complete, a very reasonable price to me.

The issue for new engines is not an existing monopoly, it’s the cost of development and manufacture given inability to compete against existing engines in the GA market, and the resulting low volumes of production. That can be helped to some degree by large injections of development money from military buyers who want jet fuel burning engines and are not operating in a commercial market.

mh wrote:

Airborne_Again wrote:
Then why is (for example) Garmin charging much, much more for a certified version of the same device?
Because they can.

Exactly.
It’s called “willingness to pay” and it’s entirely on the buyer’s side. As long as Garmin can get away with ridiculous prices for their certified kits, because people keep thinking that’s what certified stuff costs and said people are willing to pay because they want or need the functionality and blame the price tag on the certification, they will.
Why wouldn’t they? Garmin is not a charity, they’re a commercial operation, they’re in it for the money.
They somehow still manage to sell G500 for 16kUSD a piece, so why wouldn’t they?

Why do any and all cellphone manufacturers out there sell at 50+% margin? Because they can, people keep buying new phones anyway, why wouldn’t they?
Why does a Mercedes A-class sell for 2x the price of a Dacia Sandero? It’s the same size car, it can transport the same amount of people, the seats are a marginally nicer, it’s equally thirsty, the speed limits are the same, overall utility is more or less the same. But people keep buying new Mercedes’s and not only Dacia’s, so why wouldn’t they?

If anything Garmin are making a hell of a job knowing their customer base.

Enter a decent Dynon EFIS and the ok from the agencies to use non-certified (but meeting industry standards) instruments, and all of a sudden a Garmin G5 sells for 2kUSD. The G5 did not magically become cheap to produce, it was cheap to begin with. It got competition.
Even within the PMA frame of reference but without competition, they would have sold a G5 for 4-5k USD, and people would have bought them. 10k to get a dual redundant battery backed-up glass AI+HSI that doesn’t need to re-layout the whole panel but still ditch the vacuum system, people would have bought them. In lower volumes, but at 2-3k higher margin per unit.

It’s easy to get blinded by the situation though, the margin vs volume trade-off is still a (relatively) thin line to walk, you still need to right-size your fixed costs and provide customer service. The name BendixKing comes to mind.
All aviation hardware manufacturers need to maintain the myth of the cost of certification. They have a lot to lose. But as @mh highlighted, if they integrate certification work properly, it’s the normal development work, the added cost is minimal.

Silvaire wrote:

The issue for new engines is not an existing monopoly, it’s the cost of development and manufacture given inability to compete against existing engines in the GA market, and the resulting low volumes of production.

It’s a capital problem, convincing enough customers to stay afloat. Tooling-up and manufacturing a completely new engine platform is very capital-intensive.
Incumbent suppliers of goods and services are good (save a few exceptions maybe) at convincing aviation buyers to keep buying their products rather than risk trying something else. Buyers are heavily biased as well, especially when the decision concerns the one non-redundant system we have that’s keeping us in the sky, it’s in human nature to become very conservative in our risk/reward analysis. If this thread is any kind of data, most here have already decided this n+1-th diesel engine is useless and dead already and they will buy another IO-xxx next time. In my industry, that’s what we call the Please Don’t Change Anything syndrome (a pun on the PDCA method which is a change method). Alternatively “it will never work”.!
Unless the frame of reference changes. In a country where availability of 100LL is sporadic or less, the utility of a diesel engine’d plane can become interesting. Even if not strictly economic from a simple payback point of view, there is a value proposition in having a non-zero availability of the plane. In a commercial operation where availability is an indicator, the new engine might come out on top, but hardly for a hobbyist flyer. Some might try it, but will they reach the engine company’s critical mass in number and time?
Cirrus brought a new value proposition when they introduced the SR-2x, while making sure not to change some features (like trusted engines), and people were willing to pay to try the new features. A whole lot liked them and stuck with them. A slightly different balance of old features vs innovations and everybody would have gone back to buying Bo’s and 172s and Pipers (and the occasional TB), Cirrus would have run out of cash and gone under. A nice experiment.

Arne wrote:

It’s called “willingness to pay” and it’s entirely on the buyer’s side

No. It is called an artificial oligopoly. The buyers have more choice in the non-certified market because there are non-certified products competing at lower price point.

The Dynon/G5 example demonstrates that. As soon as a lower priced competitor (in this case, certified) was available, Garmin had no choice but to lower prices if they wanted to keep selling.

The cost of certification to the end user is not the cost of the certification itself, divided by the number of units. It is the monopoly profits by the certificate holder, which include $1500 flat-rate “repairs” for a flat battery.

Recently went to school for a version of of one for single engine high wing cessna. Also installed an electrical air conditioning stc..all said and done aircraft was over gw . The FAA still are not liking it.

There is the RED A03. V12 500hp diesel used in the Yak 152. It’s already EASA certified. Red also has a smaller V6, but not much info about it. Not much info at all really about the Yak or the engine. But it does apparently fly.

Here is from testing of the engine, the V12, where a Yak 52 were used as a test bed.

Not bad — 500hp out of 360kg of metal (plus cooling system etc, so probably 400kg all counted)

This puts it near the same power-to-weight range as A TIO550 (300-360 hp from 230-270kg dry). And of course, there is no mainstream Lyco / Conti in the 500hp range…

For comparison – the Austro Diesel AE300 weighs 185kg dry (plus cooling system etc) and delivers only 170hp.

Although a few things are strange (certified in 2014, first flight in 2016?) it also exists and flies, and let’s assume then can actually build more than one.

So the only thing left is economics – will it be economical to retrofit old aircraft with this (probably not, but people are paying 1 million to convert a Duke to a twin turboprop with 2×500 shp, so who knows)? What are the OEM application for this?

Cobalt wrote:

What are the OEM application for this?

Drones?

Sure, but why bother with certification and with tests in manned aircraft? Or do drones need certified engines?

Cobalt wrote:

out of 360kg of metal

250 kg metal, 320 kg all up (according to wikipedia.