The Risen is a more mature design I think, 400+ Km/hr without flutter on the V tail at least its not a Dr Killer :-). Textron should subcontract the carbon ruddervators to him
Airborne_Again wrote:
E.g. they have a fuel-injected engine and a 24V electrical system. The engine in the S model is rated at 180 hp. Also, it doesn’t necessarily have glass.
Yes 20 HP more, or like 10% 
, but that engine existed in 1971 also. And it’s not fuel injection by any standard, it’s a carb with the injector(s) displaced. A good system, but so is an ordinary carb as well. The avionics is new, which is what I said, glass. Same engine, same fuselage. It’s a pig with new make-up. But that’s not the point. The point is it is prohibitively expensive TODAY for most persons who do fly GA, but it didn’t use to be that 50 years ago when is sold en mass, and it IS the same plane (with a new make-up )
Silvaire wrote:
There are only so many obvious factual errors, red herring distractions and sophomoric exaggerations that you can address in a response before you risk losing the plot yourself
So the C-172 from 1971 is a vastly different plane? because of what? a 24v electrical system ? (does it indeed have a 24 V electrical system?). I mean please, if you don’t have anything to say, then don’t say it.
IO390 wrote:
For the price of a shark I could get an absolutely top spec RV7 and have loads of money left for fuel.
Indeed. It is indeed a bit mind boggling to me as well why people want a Shark considering what else you can get for the same amount of money (about 4-5 good condition Yak-52 for example). But people obviously do want it. Enough people to keep a small company going in a healthy fashion. That is the important thing here. By some metric it can be said to be the only important thing. But keep in mind that the Shark is not a typical UL in any way. It’s a bit like visiting AERO and get the expression that a typical UL has a turboprop in the nose.
Peter wrote:
Culturally they vary a lot and GA-wise they vary a lot. Probably 90% of European pilots will not fly outside their country, and some other large % will “on principle” never fly to a particular other country
Language is a factor here. And in many ways. You won’t get to know much about what is going on without knowing the native language. This leaves English only speakers in a disadvantage. While English in many ways is the aviation language, this is not true for private GA outside of the ATC sphere, not even in Scandinavia where most people do speak English. While I in principle can fly all over Scandinavia and Germany (with some practice ) without speaking a word of English, this would be hard for the typical English speaker.
LeSving wrote:
but that engine existed in 1971 also. And it’s not fuel injection by any standard, it’s a carb with the injector(s) displaced.
It is a proper fuel-injected engine. A Lycoming IO360-L2A. Or, if you insist, please point out where to find the carb in this picture:
The avionics is new, which is what I said, glass.
Glass was initially an option on these models. Today I believe all new 172s have glass.
Same engine, same fuselage.
It is not at all the same engine. The 1971 model (C172L) had a 150 hp Lycoming O320-E2D engine.
Obviously the panel on a new C172 does things that weren’t imaginable in 1971. This makes the plane suitable for its 2023 job which is mainly training future professional pilots that will use similar tools to make a living. Otherwise the plane is and was well engineered, and continues to do that job well too. The rest of GA as explained doesn’t often buy brand new C172s because they have a lot of other choices in today’s market. The world market, meaning the individual products, their individual volume, and who buys them at what price has adjusted to a situation in which thousands of used planes are available, plus 11,000 plus RVs etc as a now-proven alternate and ultralights for customers who are either highly fuel cost sensitive or can’t get medically certified. It will keep changing but in a way in which new products and their sales volume correspond to the reality of world market demand, not dreams from an isolated portion of the market.
The C172 has morphed due to a changing real world market from being an expensive family plane that you bought after training in a C150 to being mostly sold as a well equipped trainer for commercial pilots. Meanwhile family plane buyers who want a new plane are buying more expensive, more upmarket Cirruses in volume (because there is a market of flying families in 2023 that has the same or more money than their equivalents had in 1971) and the rest of us are buying from a broader market of new, used and kit planes that has more options and cost levels for a given amount of money than was true in 1971, including higher performance and more sporting options.
The C182 is BTW a bit different in relation to its market. I know a couple of guys who have bought new ones, in both cases as a practical SUV type plane to supplement other aircraft they own.
Airborne_Again wrote:
It is a proper fuel-injected engine
It certainly is not. Fuel is not injected anywhere. In fact the injectors draw in air from the atmosphere to atomize the fuel, just like in a carburetor. The advantages of this type of fuel “injection” is better distribution of fuel to each cylinder, no danger of carb ice, and it’s fully aerobatic (high g-tolerance). It certainly is a truly cool piece of engineering, but it is no fuel injection in the normal way we think of fuel injection (in a car, be it diesel or gasoline, or a Rotax fuel injected engine). The downside is poor atomization of fuel. There is no improvement of performance for this type of fuel injection, other than can be obtained through the improved distribution to each cylinder. A separate carb to each cylinder would be better perfomance vise I would think, but also much more expensive and troublesome
You can read all about the function of it here.
Airborne_Again wrote:
It is not at all the same engine. The 1971 model (C172L) had a 150 hp Lycoming O320-E2D engine.
Yes, well, the 360 is a longer stroke 320, nothing else has changed. An improvement in HP, yes – longer stroke – more hp, but improvements in any other aspects – doubtful.
LeSving wrote:
Fuel is not injected anywhere. In fact the injectors draw in air from the atmosphere to atomize the fuel, just like in a carburetor.
Well, an advantage with discussions such as this is that I get the opportunity to read up on the details. According to both Wikipedia and the Oxford Aviation Academy ATPL manual there are two kinds of fuel injection – direct and indirect. The IO360-L2A uses indirect fuel injection which, AFAIU, is the most common arrangement with aero piston engines. Apparently you choose to consider indirect fuel injection to be “not fuel injection by any standard”. That is of course your prerogative but it will only serve to confuse the people you are talking to.
The pump pressure on a Bendix/Lycoming injection system is about 25 psi or 1.7 atmospheres, in contrast to a carburated engine which uses only a slight vacuum induced by the venturi in the carb to draw fuel into the airflow. EFI systems (I’ve done a fair bit of engineering work on them) typically use between 35 and 60 psi for manifold injection, for example 45 psi or about 3 atmospheres on a Rotax. Direct injection into the cylinder (GDI) operates at about 2,000 psi but is not used on modern aircraft engines.
Airborne_Again wrote:
That is of course your prerogative but it will only serve to confuse the people you are talking to
Perhaps, but only because (some) people have been mislead over several decades to actually believe this system is a fuel injection system similar to what is found in cars. Direct and indirect normally refers to diesel injection. Indirect was popular a period to reduce the knocking sound of a (direct) diesel injection in private cars. Indirect here means diesel is injected in a small separate chamber in the cylinder. Then came common rail diesel injection, high pressure, which solved this and a whole bunch of other improvements.
For gasoline engines direct injection means directly into the cylinder at high pressure, as Silvaire explains. The other variant is normally referred to as manifold injection. I remember when I was a little boy, my father came home with a new car, a VW 411E with electronic multipoint fuel injection (Bosch D-Jetronic). He was so proud it was one of the first cars with this system, together with Porsche (literally the same engine altogether).
Rotax and ULPower have manifold injection. In principle the same as the old Bosch system, but it’s fully digital and the injectors are very different. In the 90s many cars had this mono manifold injection. One single injector. It worked just fine, probably due to better atomization than a carburetor.
Anyway, the main idea of injection is to atomize fuel better than can be achieved in a carburetor, and to have direct control over each nozzle as in the D-Jetronic. That’s when you start to achieve improvements in performance. A multipoint “high” pressure manifold injection system has been the norm since the late 60s. Today it’s direct injection everywhere for cars with super high pressure.
Here is the injectors for the Lycoming variant:
As it clearly says, the fuel is NOT injected. The pressure in the manifold is lower than the fuel pressure, and the fuel pressure is lower than the ambient air. This causes it to need bleed air to atomize the fuel. This kind of fuel injection has none of the benefits of the D-Jetronic. It does not atomize fuel, because the fuel pressure is lower than ambient (it needs bleed air), and there is no individual control of the nozzles, no control at all. It’s not a carburetor, I agree, but it’s not a fuel injection either. The operating principles are more that of a carburetor. It’s something different. It does the job well, it’s simple and fully mechanical, but the performance and control is nothing like what can be achieved with even the D-Jetronic from the 60s.
