----- Original Message ----- There is a saying that the DNR uses here in Wisconsin when teaching Hunter Safety and That is "Anything Mechanical CAN and WILL Fail". Of course they are referring to the safety on a gun but that also applies to an aircraft engine whether it is certified or experimental. My confidence after two years of no engine problems had me doing a lot of low level flying this past summer. I think I will go back to the altitude is my friend rule. Mark Jones (N886MJ)
That's just so much bunk. If you want to tell yourself that kind of stuff, that's fine, but your preaching to a large audience here and I'm not willing to let that statement go unchallenged. Yes, anything mechanical will fail, and I have had a few on my engines as well. But a well designed aircraft engine will rarely be the cause of a forced landing. Yes, they do happen, but it is truely a rarity with an aircraft engine. In every case where I have had something break on one of my engines, it was something that still continued to function and was found during routine maintenance. I do a fair number of overhauls and see this quite often. Cracked cranks due to prop strikes that continued to run until runout without failing. The crack was found during the magnaflux during overhaul. I have seen this twice now. Broken rocker shaft boss, the other two bosses held the rocker shaft and the broken boss was discovered during routine maintenance. Spun main bearing, engine continued to function normally. The spun bearing was found during tear down due to spauled cam. Engines assembled incorrectly, but have been flown to runout. The list goes on and on. I see all kinds of really bad things in Lycoming and Continental engines that were still performing within normal standards. That's the way aircraft engines are designed. They will take a tremendous amount of abuse and will continue to perform as designed. The systems in them are overdesigned and redundant. Usually the engine will talk to you as it's getting ill if you are only willing to listen. To say that all mechanical things will fail, so I'll just leave it to fate is a bit misleading. Sorry, but you can't lump my engines into that fatalistic column and say, well what the heck, it's gonna break anyway. I fully expect my engines to perform within normal parameters through TBO. I do expect for them to have occasional issues, but I don't EVER expect one of them to have a complete failure in flight. If I did, I would sell both planes and be done with aviation. The KR crowd have been extrordinaily lucky not to have killed anyone with the number of forced landings over the last few years. Be thankful that you are not based high up in the mountains where I am as the survival rate of forced landings would not likely be so outstanding. If you guys want to run me off the list for making sacreligeous statements slandering the Corvairs, that's fine. But the fact is, their record is abismal. The only reason we haven't lost a number of pilots has been due to a lot of good luck and good pilot skills. Jeff Scott Los Alamos, NM (N1213W & N143W) <http://jscott.comlu.com>
