Airborne_Again wrote:
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the diesel part.
No? So you disagreeing is more a matter of principle?
“You are right but i do not agree with you”.
LeSving wrote:
So you disagreeing is more a matter of principle?
I think he disagrees with the rest of your post re what is what.
Clearly, GA will have a massive problem this way or the other in the future when it comes to what kind of engines / fuel to use. Diesel is for me the one viable solution for all the reasons mentioned before, but in the end whe have no idea what our politicians will figure out until then.
First of all, a lot of EU countries will massively object against having gasoline driven cars withdrawn in this generation,primarily because there nobody ever has bought a new car and they live of what the richer northern countries discard. Should i.e. Germany ban all gasoline cars by 2030 say, then most of those will find their way to countries where these cars will be welcome for decades to come. Neither Bulgaria, Greece, Romania or Poland (amongst others) will be able to impose bans on petrol cars for a very long time to come and bans on new cars, not many people care as nobody buys new cars anyhow. However, Germany is a key industry here, as the diesels used for the Thielert/Continental engine are car engines by Mecedes. What if Mercedes drops diesel? Where are the blocks for the Contis coming from?
The fact is however that new alternative propulsion systems for GA are needed and seeing that it takes up to a decade to ever certify anything, people better start thinking fast. Of all the technologies I can see, for the standard GA tourer of the past, present and future, there is no alternative to Diesel.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I think he disagrees with the rest of your post re what is what.
Yes. I would think that was obvious from my posting. The list of what kind of aircraft different people use was kind of … silly.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
However, Germany is a key industry here, as the diesels used for the Thielert/Continental engine are car engines by Mecedes. What if Mercedes drops diesel? Where are the blocks for the Contis coming from?
Mercedes dropped the OM640 — which is the Thielert/Conti 2.0 and 2.0s — in 2012 for the A-class and in 2014 for the B-class so the engine is 100% dead. Thielert manufactures all relevant parts by themselves and get the auxiliary parts from the usual suspects (Bosch, Mahle, Continental [the car company], etc.). They do not depend on continued supply of new parts by Mercedes. As to how Austro Engine cope with the end of the engine — I do not know. They use it in almost original condition and looking at their (ever confusing) latest communication, I see a gradual shift away from that engine towards SMA.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
First of all, a lot of EU countries will massively object against having gasoline driven cars withdrawn
Nobody will withdraw anything and never listen to a politician telling you what will happen 10 or 20 years from now. Policy does not extend beyond the next election. This is just about changing the mindset and giving new technologies a push. People should get rid of their 10 year old cars and buy modern cars while starting to consider electric cars. The car industry at the same time gets a push out of their comfort zone to accelerate development. They all had been in a position to deliver great electric cars for many years but there was no demand and they had little incentive to create that demand.
We need that same push in GA. Shame 100LL and our wasteful engines and promote a single fuel strategy. It’s just a shame that the US plays such a predominant rule in GA and that there is very little reason to make a technology leap in GA.
Airborne_Again wrote:
The list of what kind of aircraft different people use was kind of … silly.
But well in line with other stuff 
achimha wrote:
They do not depend on continued supply of new parts by Mercedes.
Good to know. So even more, the Conti/Thielert series appears to be safe enough in the future.
achimha wrote:
I see a gradual shift away from that engine towards SMA.
Which might be a good sign. SMA’s engine needs mass production in order to get to a reasonable price.
achimha wrote:
People should get rid of their 10 year old cars and buy modern cars while starting to consider electric cars.
This assumes that most people buy cars every 10 years… I am 54 years of age now and in my third second hand car which is 15 years old but which I have no intention of getting rid of. The day and age where cars were built to fail after 10 years are long gone thankfully. My first car was one of those and I managed to extend it’s life to 20 years but it was not a funny thing to do.
We’ve been going on about electric cars in many threads now. Personally I lack the conviction that there is enough electricity available if people really switch over in bulk and I believe it is part of a larger scheme to limit people’s freedom of travel and particularly individual transport, combined with making them even more dependent on government owned and sponsored electricity. I am very wary of that, having seen the effects of a run amock electricity policy and how it ran a whole country into poverty. It is imho rather naive to assume that especcially countries who have actively cut down a lot of power production by banning whole technologies will be able to put up with the increased demand.
achimha wrote:
Shame 100LL and our wasteful engines and promote a single fuel strategy.
The primary bit about this is it needs to be affordable, otherwise it will be the death of GA. Currently most owners I know fly old airplanes because these are the only ones they can afford. If there is any move to take away the fuel they need and the alternative is € 600k new fancy airframes, GA will simply die. So if they are working on something, then it has to fit our current spam cans.
If they really want a push, then certification for planes of less than 5.7 tons has to be completely revised to bring down the horriffic cost in time and money just to develop a new plane. If you look at the times the AA5 for instance was born out of the AA1, it took TWO years from the start of the idea to the first delivered airplane. Today, a certification of a radio can take 10 years, making it obsolete once it comes out. Almost all companies who developed clean sheet designs in GA in recent years went bancrupt in the process, today we see those who survived by being bought out of bancruptcy. That is no way to run the proverbial railroad.
Nor is it a solution to revert to non-certified planes but at the same time restrict those to day-vfr.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I believe it is part of a larger scheme to limit people’s freedom of travel and particularly individual transport, combined with making them even more dependent on government owned and sponsored electricity.
@Mooney_Driver, I think you hit the nail right on the head there.
Don’t forget the chemtrail program…
LeSving wrote:
Theoretically – yes, but private GA is a recreational activity, 99% at least.
The key word here is ‘private’. In this you are perhaps correct, but you make the mistake – shared by about 99% of European pilots – of seeing GA primarily as a private/recreational activity. This is true for Europe, but much less so for the US and totally wrong in Africa, Australia, South America and the Pacific. These are the places that have Avgas issues, but also cannot easily switch to Mogas, as most of the aircraft operating there are in the higher-power category that needs Avgas. While there is a certain swing towards turbines, anything that can burn Jet-A would be very, very valuable in these circumstances.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Almost all companies who developed clean sheet designs in GA in recent years went bancrupt in the process, today we see those who survived by being bought out of bancruptcy. That is no way to run the proverbial railroad.
I thought developing technology for its own sake, at great expense, then giving it to others is Germany’s national role? 
