Awhile ago, someone asked whether it would be a good idea to have a small gasoline engine in a plane and use it to keep the battery charged, instead of having an alternator on the engine. Many people (including me) said this was impractical and a regular alternator works fine.
Now I may be changing my mind. Where I live you can hardly go anywhere without being within 30 miles of the gigantic Class B created by Kennedy, Newark, and La Guardia airports (they're so close together the airspaces merge). My house is even under it, although I'm an hour's drive from any of them. So in 6 years, I'm going to need "ADS-B out" if I want to fly anywhere near where I live, even though it doesn't do me the slightest bit of good -- ADS-B out is basically so the $$$$$ planes that fly IFR all the time can see me on their screens without bothering to look out the window. Planes like that won't care about the cost, but I will, because it'll probably be more than a VW engine. The only exception is if your plane was certified without an "engine-driven alternator." That was in the regs for all the old planes without an electrical system, but many homebuilts are that way too (including Ken Rand's original KR-1). A wind-generator is allowed by those regs, but that's a lot of drag. So I'm wondering: when the regs say you can't have an "engine-driven alternator," do they mean driven by THE engine or by ANY engine? If it means THE engine, then you could have a small engine driving a little alternator (like the one Great Plains sells for their flywheel-drive engines, and still fly within the Mode C veil. (I'd probably have solar panels on the fuselage too, so I wouldn't need it all the time). Does anybody know anything about this? I can't be the only tightwad facing this problem. Mike Taglieri
