OEI landing DA42

Thank you, Emir, for the information and congrats how you handled the emergency!

One thing is sloppy installation mentioned earlier. A disgrace. Another thing:

Thielert (the name sticks, although it is now a Conti CD-series engine, so much better ) engines require a replacement of coolant hoses every 5 years, probably the same for Austro engines. Costly, and a little frustrating too, because when mine were replaced 2 years ago the mechanics and I looked at the old ones and could not distinguish them from new.. Clamps and other hardware looked fine too.
So, I was left with the feeling that I had not only spent money for something that was probably not needed, I had also introduced a risk in that someone could have made a mistake in this pretty extensive re-hosing job. ‘Why change a winning team’ came to mind.

Nice little revenue stream for Conti. But (if they are not already doing so) it is high time for them to consider extending the replacement interval of these components or come up with an inspection procedure rather than calender-time replacement. They need to continue to bring down maintenance cost if they want Diesels to become the de-facto standard in GA. Although there are other advantages of flying Diesels, cost is still the name of the game. In most places of Europe the equation of extra maintenance vs fuel cost saving works out in favor of Diesels, in the US it probably doesn’t.

Do you have to buy the hoses from Conti?

You get the same issue with Socata. The engine hoses are US-thread (NPT) and thus cheap. The one external oil hose (apart from the six little ones feeding the rocker covers, there is only one oil hose, for the oil pressure sensing, and it is fed via a restricted orifice in case of a leak) is ISO metric thread and very expensive – about 10x the normal price. One can get them made but the French outfit (Aeroquip) which has a monopoly on the fittings notices they are Socata hoses and quotes a very long lead time But the cost is still 50% of Socata’s. I got two made by Saywells in Worthing, UK, a while ago.

Mine were replaced in 2012 and that’s when and where sloppy work came from.

So that was up in Sweden? If so, that’s not what would expect in that country..

Do you have to buy the hoses from Conti?

At that point in time yes. Since then, my service station has been looking for commercial (automotive) replacements and I think he does that now.

I don’t think you need to go for automotive stuff, when an NPT-terminated hose with an EASA-1 form is so relatively cheap. The issue is with metric-terminated hoses, which is why I asked if that’s what they were. I would expect Thielert to be metric, but who knows? Apparently Airbus use NPT hoses – presumably because they want to sell to the USA.

aart wrote:

require a replacement of coolant hoses every 5 years, probably the same for Austro engines.

Actually doesn’t look like it – I checked the Austro AE300 Maintenance Manual & there’s a 100 hr visual inspection and cleaning of all fuel & coolant lines, but no scheduled replacement interval. The Conti & Austro maintenance regimes seems to differ quite a bit…