Re TP engines, one hears of too many failures to support the fantastic reliability figures sometimes mentioned,
Pretty much all commercial flying has gone TP, therefore you are looking at vastly higher hours than in piston aircraft.
I would imagine at least part of the reliability of the TP being the professionalism of anyone owning it/maintaining it. Ie if you own a 2m airplane you’re not gonna mess around with it the same way someone with a 50k plane could even be 20k!
I agree. I think most TPs are flown by professional crews or at least by private pilots trained to a professional standard. You don’t just hop in a PC12 and go, as you would with a C172. Certainly in the US the insurance company will see to that.
Yes the professional maintenance bias needs to be accounted for as well. Most operators will not carry people over an ocean with a single engine. But there are still far fewer moving parts in a TP. The number of things that need to work together is much smaller. Not counting restart which can be more complicated, you only need not-broken rotating parts and controllable fuel nozzles. No valves synchronized with pistons, no up and down constraints (and I believe no ignition as well, since it’s continuous combustion, but I’m not sure about that).
Peter wrote:
what about carb icing which is not addressed quick enough?
Carb icing 1) is related to management (the pilot needs to know it can happen and can easily check if it starts building up) and 2) in some cases can be recoverable by going lower so to me it doesn’t really count. But of course that’s a matter of definition.
