Sometimes I wonder how aviation ever got to evolve past Gnome rotary engines and castor oil.
Simple answer: war. Even at the end of WW1 it had become clear that the limits of the rotary engine design had been reached. By the end of WW1 piston engine design was ready to enter it final step of evolution. By the end of WW2, idem ditto for the turbine engine. OK, this is over simplified, but WW1 and WW2 and the cold war have been the incentives to technological progress, both in performance and in reliability. Fuel burn was not a concern, however; the effect is still visible.
Pilots like pressing buttons and moving levers
Yes indeed – either because they enjoy expensive mechanical toys or because they love to show off their ability to manipulate a complex machine.
Do they still sell new aircraft with IO-360 or whatever engines that still require carb-heat, or are they all fuel injected?
I feel very sure they are still being made, and sold. As long as some are willing to buy them (i.e. there is a market sufficiently big), it would be clean daft to refuse to make them.
My question was tongue-in-cheek Jan :)
“Pilots like pressing buttons and moving levers”
“Yes indeed – either because they enjoy expensive mechanical toys or because they love to show off their ability to manipulate a complex machine”
Also because most of them display illusory superiority.
“Yes this machine is unnecessarily complicated and its operation could be simplified by a factor of magnitude but I possess above average machine handling skills so there’s no need for all this progress malarkey”.
yes yes, the tongue in cheek had been detected, for this once (as it had been with the castor oil 
) – I just failed to think of a wittier response.
Yes, I have to concur with you Shorrick.
It’s hard for my eyes not to roll into the back of my head with some aspects of extremely stubborn aviation dogma. Embrace simplicity and revel in the complexity it creates!
Real pilots fly aircraft which are simple. This makes flying them more complex and arguably more risky to fly. Tailwheels are mandatory for the same reasons. Electric starters only debase the risk, so of course hand propping is mandatory. GPS removes the skill of navigating, so out comes the stopwatch (analogue of course), and compass.
It’s not so much the fact that people revel in this approach…horse for courses…but it’s almost the tacit implication that anyone who doesn’t, isn’t a real pilot.
I know how to do long division, but wouldn’t dream of using it in everyday work. A spreadsheet is far less error prone and much more efficient.
I like simple machines because I own them and maintain them, and don’t to plan to sell them at a depreciated value. That’s really pretty simple too.
I like portable moving map GPS a lot because I can navigate via the USAF tool and the actual chart without having to modify my aircraft every time a new box comes along. See paragraph one. Good stuff.
Re aircraft technical progress in the interwar period, minus the impetus of war: Two things that come to mind are aluminum skinned structures and horizontally opposed small engines.
Yes, I have to concur with you Shorrick.
It’s hard for my eyes not to roll into the back of my head with some aspects of extremely stubborn aviation dogma. Embrace simplicity and revel in the complexity it creates!
Real pilots fly aircraft which are simple. This makes flying them more complex and arguably more risky to fly. Tailwheels are mandatory for the same reasons. Electric starters only debase the risk, so of course hand propping is mandatory. GPS removes the skill of navigating, so out comes the stopwatch (analogue of course), and compass.
It’s not so much the fact that people revel in this approach…horse for courses…but it’s almost the tacit implication that anyone who doesn’t, isn’t a real pilot.
I know how to do long division, but wouldn’t dream of using it in everyday work. A spreadsheet is far less error prone and much more efficient.
This is silly. What is wrong with flying the aircraft you like to fly?
Nothing…as I stated in my OP….it horses for courses.
Where it gets silly, as has been said, is the palpable sense of illusory superiority that is attributed to making the act of flying an aircraft as challenging as possible, and that any innovation which simplifies the task is treated with derision as “not something a real pilot would do”
I’m not directing these comments toward anyone here, but I have met many of the people I have described, and I have never understood the mentality. In no small part because they don’t appear to apply the same approach to any of the other endeavors in their life.
Two things that come to mind are aluminum skinned structures and horizontally opposed small engines.
The horizontally opposed engines I had been wondering about while reading – the subject is interesting enough to merit a thread of its own.
Concerning “skinned” (by which I suppose you mean “load-bearing” iow “stressed”) structures, whether in wood or metal, wasn’t the DH Mosquito’s the pioneer design? Or was it the Vickers Wellington?
What does the Carb heat and mixture control (to name a few) add to the flying experience that makes them so important to protect? To the point where it is better to keep them for all future designs than to remove them?
They don’t. Certainly I would much rather fly with a single-control FADEC-equipped fuel-injected engine than with a carburetor engine with separate mixture control — just as I much prefer to fly with a slaved HSI than with a CDI and unslaved DG. But that doesn’t make such an engine a “flawed design”.
I think a lot of opinions might change when facing the burden of ownership that comes along with the joys of ownership. Flying somebody else’s plane kind of frees you to criticize the owners choices, doesn’t it? I’d be genuinely interested in knowing what aircraft, engines etc. posters in this thread buy with their hard earned money as time goes on.
Jan, aluminum stressed skin construction was introduced into production in the thirties with aircraft such as the DC-3, Ju-52 and (very early for a light plane) the Messerschmitt 108. Small, horizontally opposed engines similarly popped into being simultaneously worldwide in that period (VW etc in Europe), but for aircraft applications the Lycoming was first into volume production, followed by Continental, which was initially better. Cubs had all of them including Franklins, and they more or less put radials out of business, and eventually inverted engines too.
