One could post any number of dodgy engine pics. There is one here somewhere where an injector was blown out of the Thielert cylinder, ripped the fuel pipe and sprayed fuel all over the exhaust. Crap workmanship (over-torque) no doubt but hey that is common…
The above pics looks like ones of a very tired plane, badly looked after. If you do that with the newer stuff you end up with rot a lot sooner especially as their fittings tend to be badly plated. One A&P I know says they have to replace a lot of fittings at each Annual, simply due to corrosion.
Both sides of the coin really… but if you want a new plane, you have very little choice today. It’s a DA40, DA42 if you can be bothered to get the ME papers and can park the rather larger plane somewhere, or an SR22.
The diesels appear to make their TBO/TBR much more reliably even though they are much younger designs. The Lycomings/Contis have major construction flaws that remain unaddressed. A 300hp AVGAS engine consumes cylinders in 600-800h, the Lycomings eat camshafts, Contis have head-barrel separations, starter adapters shred gears requiring very involved case opening repairs, etc. AVGAS engine overhaulers deliver you overhauled engines that leak oil and tell you “this can happen”.
Most of the diesel engine criticisms are highly unfair in my view, double standards. They have new ways of failing on you and they had teething problems but I think in 2017, a Thielert driven airplane is a safer bet in terms of expected lifetime and hourly cost than a Lycoming.
Lycoming had a huge POS engine, the O-320-H2AD (AD for Airworthiness Directive). Why is today’s perception of Lycoming not based on this mega flop? Why is Thielert always associated with a substandard clutch design that was given up years ago? Let’s be fair to manufacturers please.
Everybody knows why Thielert got a bad name – it was their shafting of so many users, starting with Mr Thielert’s arrogant, desperate and stupid (child’s IQ-level really) mega fraud, the company’s bankrupcy, loss of warranties, etc. One FTO told me they could have run a TBM700 for the same money. Another had 75% of their DA42 fleet grounded for months. One can argue this is unfair to talk about today, and smart well informed people are happy to buy the product, but if you ask why Thielert has a bad name, this is a big part of the answer. In GA people are very conservative, and they have to be when their own money is involved. You fly an old Cessna 182RG, after all 
You should buy a DA42.
Thielert was an unrealistic enterprise overselling to its investors and went bust. Still, they managed to build a great engine with the investors’ money. Some customers got burned, not unusual. If they had been realistic and conservative, the engine would have never come to life. The developers of the original Manhattan skyscrapers all went bust because they oversold and underestimated the complexity. The ones that picked it up for pennies on the dollar got filthy rich. I got burned by running a business with terribly bad first generation Volvo engines (which according to arrogant Volvo are without problems and only by pure coincidence they changed every single aspect of them that made them fail in our operation…). Capitalism tends to exaggerate optimism and pessimism, both coming in regular cycles.
I think Lycoming customers that were affected by the crankshaft AD got shafted, much worse than Thielert. This was a company (with little technical skills left) trying to increase their profits by using a cheaper supplier of crucial parts and when those parts started to fail, they made even more money forcing their customers to buy that part again. That is much more despicable than the Thielert story.
I fly a Lycoming because I’m not in the market for a 155hp aircraft. If the $175k SMA STC applies to the TR182, I would consider it. Very unlikely though because of limited space due to the retractable gear. It was the RG model in 1978 that made Cessna install Lycomings in the 182 airframe instead of the standard Conti because only the top camshaft allowed them to fit the retractable gear…
Achim I think EPS flies a SR22 where their engine fits in the cowl – or at least it does not bulge out on the sides, and given the plane “does fly” the balance must not be off by that much.
Whether it meets the claimed numbers and what the final weight is… that’s something else, but in its current form it does fly on the SR platform.
If diesels were all that were available (I would guess) 90% of the people flying their own light aircraft today could not afford to do so. I think that’s the bottom line the governs the prospects of diesel GA aircraft. As long as that is the case, the (19 years flying without OEM sales) SMA won’t sell, and the Mercedes based engines will continue to serve a small niche market, having now been developed to ‘expensive but adequate value for some users’, with the help of US military money.
I flew my little A-65 today for the first time since September. It started on the first swing and performed perfectly, like always since it was overhauled last in ‘97. My O-320 flies more now and provides very good service, as it has since it was assembled in 1971. I’ll probably fly it 50 years to its first ~$20K overhaul, it should getting in the neighborhood of TBO by then and eventually I’ll want to retire and fly it a lot more hours.
$175K is a totally silly amount of money for an engine. That amount invested will make roughly $10K per year, which I think would fund overhauls and fuel forever for most C182 owners.
You have to compare the diesel airframes to factory new avgas models and the price difference becomes small. In fact the 155hp Robin is a very attractive new plane. As an incremental update to an existing avgas plane, they’re a tough business case.
I neither share your pride in $20k functional Japanese cars nor the desire to fly a Lycoming last overhauled in 1957 with free of chyrge neighborhood maintenance. I like modern technology and I am willing to pay for it if I think it delivers value. Old is something of historical inrerest to me, something I like to study in a museum to help me understand today’s world but I do not like to surround myself with old stuff. A valid point of view, as is yours.
I like modern technology and I am willing to pay for it if I think it delivers value.
Yet, you freely choose to fly what you would probably call an old heap A DA42 has a similar payload, can burn avtur (very useful for your trips to Egypt) and can be bought new and thoroughly modern.
The issue for Diesels is not what any individual may prefer, but what will sell to the market in volume. Diesels won’t – because they are waste of money for most potential buyers, less functional for the non-fantasy market.
I like technology, not new, not old, but the best for the job. Turbo Diesels would be a ridiculous for most owners.
A waste of money for most potential buyers who have time and friends and a shed to tinker 10h in said shed on a 1950es vintage engine for each 1h of flight.
Which, as the vintage car scene illustrates, is about 0.1% of total potential buyers…
I think the actual real fantasy is thinking everyone has access to free qualified tech labor, endless amounts of time and space, and nothing else to do than waiting for things to get fixed.
