Continental engines look nicer.
Is this a competition plague vs cholera?
I’d rather have a modern power plant in my plane, but I have to keep up with the 30ties high tech.
Is this a competition plague vs cholera?
Yes 
. It’s all in the title.
I’d rather have a modern power plant in my plane, but I have to keep up with the 30ties high tech.
My thinking too. Love the smell of Jet-A… Well actually no. But I like those diesels.
I’d rather have a modern power plant in my plane, but I have to keep up with the 30ties high tech.
I thought so, too but I’m actually at a point where I wished that my modern electronic common rail turbo diesels from Volvo that I operate in commercial boats were Lycoming engines. The trouble I’ve had during the last 12 months are beyond description. These engines fail in every possible way and there are about 1000 more ways to fail than with the dinosaur engines. Maintaining Lyco/Conti requires horse-smith qualification, maintaining a modern diesel requires a sterile environment and following the procedures word by word.
Any of it linked to operator error or is it all hardware related?
A mix of both but the majority of the costly stuff due to very poor engineering on Volvo’s part. The worst of all was a snapped alternator belt which happened to jump into the tooth belt which in turn jumped 2 teeth and then the pistons smashed the cylinder headd. That is such incredible bad luck, won’t be able to reproduce this in 1000 years. Still, using tooth belts and not protecting it completely is poor quality. It’s cheaper and more efficient than a gear driven cam inside the crankcase but a lot less robust. The Mercedes like chains are better but still no comparison to an internal gear like Lyco/Conti and Yanmar in boating.
Or an engine that shuts down because of an intermittent bad ground to the ECU is just a failure mode I don’t need. Neither in an aircraft nor a commercial boat. Of course it happened with 30kt of wind…
Resilience to bad fuel is another topic, both applying to aircraft and boats. If I drive my boat/fly my plane in Northern Europe I’m fine but both are designed to travel the world and outside North Europe / North America, the fuel quality is universally bad.
… similar to: “Which dinosaur is better: Brontosaurus or Tyrannosaurus?” … Doesn’t matter: all of them are dead!
I thought so, too but I’m actually at a point where I wished that my modern electronic common rail turbo diesels from Volvo that I operate in commercial boats were Lycoming engines. The trouble I’ve had during the last 12 months are beyond description. These engines fail in every possible way and there are about 1000 more ways to fail than with the dinosaur engines
What does that tell you about the suitability of road engines for a constant high power application like aviation?
What does the aggregate number of hours flown incident free by said road engines tell you about the suitability of road engines for a constant high power application like aviation?
As a matter of fact although the "constant high power " mantra is constantly thrown around, you’ll notice the failures Achim experienced have nothing to do with operating at “constant high power” but rather with design and manufacture shortcomings which abound on both Lyco and Conti.
