Welcome, Al...
 
Lets see if in the end IF the overall risk ends up being greater or less.. I suspect that the TYPES of risks involved will be somewhat different (as in - failure modes).. between the two engine types..the other thing to keep in mind is that there is not a standardized installation of the rotary package (not counting the powersport engine) so there is likely a tremendous variability from engine to engine just among the rotary types. I acknowledge that I may be trading one set of "known" risks for another set of "unknown risks" but time will tell. In the meantime, I don't plan on doing anything foolish, such as running with scissors.

Glad to have you here,
Dave

al p wick wrote:

Allright. Hang me.

First, someone cross posted my email on the subject. Totally fine by me.
Second, I haven't seen any previous posts on the subject, so blast away!

I just joined. It may not be apparent, but my goal is to reduce flight
risks. Regardless of type of power plant.

My background. My entire work career dealt with failures. Day after day
investigating the causes for each failure. Huge variety. Mechanical,
electrical, systemic, you name it. More significantly, eventually I had
the power to change the response to failures. This allowed me to test my
theories on how to eliminate them. So there would be a failure, I'd
implement a change, then measure how often the failure occurred in the
future. Investigate, alter the solution, remeasure. There are all these
patterns to failures that we usually don't notice. It's remarkable. 

When I first started looking into the rotary risks, I was shocked. I
thought "My God, I have to let these guys know!". But instead, I ignored
it for a few days,question my perception,  then started the process of
measuring the risks instead of relying on impressions. I'm not done, far
from it. But it's so clear that the path most take is of extreme risk, I
thought it best to post what I had so far. I thought "maybe one or two
guys will read this and take more effective action at reducing risk". 

I have already measured the Lyc risks. Yikes! Quite a bit higher than I
expected. They have significant crank, valve and head risk. The total is
1 failure per 1800  hours. This based on 49k flight hours in Cozy
aircraft over 5 year period.




-al wick
Artificial intelligence in cockpit, Cozy IV powered by stock Subaru 2.5
N9032U 200+ hours on engine/airframe from Portland, Oregon
Prop construct, Subaru install, Risk assessment, Glass panel design info:
http://www.maddyhome.com/canardpages/pages/alwick/index.html

  

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