For engine builders, pistons require numerous specialized machine operations and inspections, so theyve generally come into the plant through the shipping dock. So it was surprising when Lycoming announced in 2010 that it was installing its own piston line.
To survive in a market thats a shadow of what it was 40 years ago, Lycoming and Continental have had to reinvent themselves. This is the first of a series explaining changes at the engine companies.
Whens the last time your late-model car broke? Not a check-engine light, but we’ll and truly quit? It probably hasnt happened and one reason for that is that modern automotive quality is relentlessly driven by quality control systems that favor high volume in factories that build the very same engine, or transmission or ignition module in which the only thing that changes in 50,000 units are the serial numbers.
At the opposite end that continuum is Lycoming, a company that holds more than 700 engine type certificates, each with different designations, different model numbers, unique accessories and sometimes discrete core components for the same families of engines. A Toyota process engineer used to making 300,000 Camry engines a year would need a fistful of Valium to survive the shock of touring the assembly line in Williamsport.
Yet…Lycoming has confronted the seemingly insurmountable challenge of so-called high-mix, low-volume manufacturing with a careful, if modest, program of re-investment in a factory whose origins date to the 19th century. Even as the market it depends on flattens or shrinks, the factory has reduced its physical footprint and become measurably more efficient. Twenty years ago, it was outsourcing raw manufacturing at such a rapid clip that it seemed it would evolve into an assembly business with a specialty in drop shipping parts.
Didnt happen. Today, thanks to rapid advances in flexible, computer numerical machine tools and a determination to adapt high-volume quality control methods to trickle volume, Lycoming is bringing vendor work back inhouse.
Now, Lycoming produces many parts that it used to outsource at prices competitive with vendors and at what it says is potentially higher quality. This could be an MBA case study in turnaround management, but its more accurate to describe it as a survival story in an industry worn down by declining markets and escalating costs. Last fall, I spent nearly three days touring and filming the plant for this report and an accompanying video. Heres what I learned.
If Continental Motors ever had any doubts about the aerodiesel market, it erased them in July with the stroke of a pen with the company’s acquisition of the bankrupt assets of Thielert aircraft Engines GmbH. Despite a rocky ending for Thielert culminating in the jailing of its founder, Thielert (and Diamond) put aircraft diesels on the map during the last decade. With its own in-house Jet A TD300 and the addition of Thielert, Continental instantly becomes the market volume leader in aircraft diesel.
ADS-B For EFIS I enjoyed reading your evaluation of the three most prominent ADS-B EFIS products in the June issue. I received my Stratus II about three days before reading your article. There is one, important negative feature of the Stratus II: It will only show the horizon in the landscape mode. If one has an iPad on a yoke mount, it will most likely be in the vertical position, so the horizon will be 90 degrees off. Otherwise, the iPad has to be taken off the yoke mount and held in the horizontal position, not easily done.
No replacement for displacement. There’s no substitute for horsepower. The clichés have been stuck in your head for a few months. You own a single-engine Cessna and you want more performance, but you don’t want to buy more airplane. You want to know if you can drop more engine in your airframe, how much it will increase performance, what it will cost and whether you’ll get the investment back when you sell the airplane. We’ll walk you through the answers to those questions while providing a sampling of some of the amazing number of engine mods available for single-engine Cessnas. We’ll also discuss how to look at the cost-benefit evaluation of a conversion.
At Aviation Consumer, our job is to sift through marketing hype and conduct impartial evaluations of products and services. Sometimes this includes products that aren’t yet to market, creating uncertainty regarding the product’s future. That was the case nearly a year ago when we covered Avidyne’s IFD540 and IFD440 GPS navigators (September 2012). We recommended the IFD series as an easy way to modernize a stack of aged Garmin GNS navigators. The major attraction is the IFDs plug-and-play design, which slides into a Garmin GNS530W and GNS430W installation.
When we visited the Cirrus Aircraft factory in Duluth, Minnesota, last month, we couldn’t help notice the positive vibes that echo throughout the operation. There’s reason for boardroom fist pumps. Production slots for the new G5 SR22 are sold out through October, the SF50 Vision Jet is we’ll on the way toward certification and delivery in 2015, and the competition is struggling to sell half as many aircraft as Cirrus did last year. Cirrus built a total of 253 aircraft last year alone. Unlike other manufacturers, Cirrus doesn’t distribute aircraft to a dealer network, so production is based on customer orders.
It goes from bad to worse. You sense something isn’t right with your engine, so you ask your shop to have a look. Hopefully it’s a fouled spark plug. Wishful thinking didn’t help because your shop called with news that you hoped not to hear for at least a few years: It’s time for an engine because half of the cylinders have low compression and there are valve problems, too. The shop suggests an overhaul. With dollar signs dancing in your eyeballs, it’s decision time. Do you opt for a field overhaul or buy a factory engine? How about cylinders, hoses, engine mounts and downtime? These are major considerations. The engine shop market is changing, so we conducted an engine shop experience survey on sister site AVweb.com to get a feel for how engine shops and the components they use are performing.
If avionics move forward at the speed of light—well, sound anyway—aircraft engine progress is rather more glacial, but it is progressing as we reported last spring with Rotax’s rollout of the new 912 iS. Although a few months late, the new engine is finally delivering in volume and we flew one in a Flight Design CTLSi, a new version from the leader in LSA sales. To speed the uptake, Rotax intended the 912 iS to be a bolt-up option for manufacturers and it basically is that, although some minor airframe mod requirements mean it’s not exactly an afternoon swap-out project. Just as Rotax predicted, the engine delivers better fuel economy over the 912 ULS used in many LSAs and its operation is somewhat simplified. (Not that the ULS exactly required a flight engineer.) But you’ll pay for the privilege of knocking the fuel burn down by a half a gallon. The asking price of the CTLSi is nearly $13,000 higher than the standard model with the 912 ULS Rotax. Presumably, there will be some payback in lower maintenance costs, but that’ll be for the future to prove.
Speed matters. Ask any pilot. Frustratingly, speed costs money and lots of speed, as the warbird set says, costs cubic money. In the single-engine piston world, we’d each love to blast across the sky over 230 knots in a Cessna TTX, yet for most, the exchequer doesn’t quite stretch to the nearly three-quarters of a million dollars needed to buy one. In this day and aviation market age, a $180,000 purchase price isn’t out of line, especially if it’s split a few ways. Moving through the air at 180 knots is cooking along nicely, so in keeping with our general fascination with symmetrical numbers, we decided to create the 180 for 180 club and then find out what airplanes are qualified to join—those that have a real-life cruise speed of at least 180 knots and a Bluebook value of $180,000 or less. It turns out that a nice selection of airplanes qualify for the club. Naturally, our research lead to a number of caveats—few of the airplanes in the speed and price range were built in this century, and every single one of them is of sophisticated design with complex systems, so a careful pre-buy carried out by a maintenance technician who knows the type of aircraft is essential if you are going to avoid purchasing yourself a financial nightmare.
Back in 1996, when General Aviation Modifications, Inc., (GAMI) of Ada, Oklahoma, announced that it had developed tuned fuel injectors called GAMIjectors, we were skeptical of claims that these gadgets made the engine smoother and more economical through lean of peak EGT (LOP) operation. After all, we’d seen our share of bolt-on engine devices that promised to enhance engine performance, longevity and cut fuel use than we liked to recall. Few if them worked. But GAMI was persistent and it published detailed engine operational data which helped sell the product to a pilot community accustomed to “trust-us, it-works” marketing. GAMIjectors developed a strong following, with more than 1000 selling in the first year. Loyal acolytes praised them to the skies, insisting that they were burning less fuel and their engines were running cooler. A devoted core of skeptics took the opposite view, arguing that owners were going to burn up their engines, cylinder life would be measured in double digits and the engine manufacturers would deny warranty claims on modified engines.
When considering the viability of electric-powered aircraft, it’s important to note the huge difference between the internal combustion (IC) engine that burns hydrocarbon fuels and an electric motor that relies on a battery energy source. The ratio of air mass to fuel mass at efficient combustion (stoichiometry) is about 14.6. That is, for every pound of fuel burned, 14.6 pounds of air are consumed. But you don’t have to carry the air since it is available in the atmosphere. Fuel weighs about 6 pounds per gallon, so 16 gallons of fuel weigh about 100 pounds. Over 1400 pounds of air will be consumed in burning that amount of fuel. An electric motor requires that all of the energy be contained in the battery. Since the energy density of lithium batteries is about 26 times less than the energy of gasoline, there is nowhere for electric propulsion to go. It is interesting to note that gasoline has 10 times the energy density of TNT that needs to carry its oxidizer within.
