Month: September 2015

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“Zen-vair” and “Piet-vair” Discussion Groups, your resource.

Builders,

We run two private discussion groups, Zenvair and Pietvair. They are for builders using our conversions on  Zeniths and Pietenpols respectively.  These sites have very large data bases of factual information, all provided by known people with real names. If you printed the archives of either group, you would have a book several hundred pages long, made purely of good data.

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The groups are very friendly, effectively moderated, and have great graphic and picture information, and very organized formats. If you are building either one of these popular combinations, you should regard these as your #1 source of technical information, delivered with a batch of friendly encouragement. There is absolutely no cost to being part of these groups, They are moderated by well known members Corvair community, and the content is provided by your fellow builders.

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-ww,

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“Zenvair”

Moderator: Phil Maxson 

Number of Members: 110

Number of active Threads: 260

Number of Posts: 960

Sign up qualifications and information:

Zen Vair discussion group update, notes on joining

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“Pietvair”

Moderator: Terry Hand

Number of Members: 102

Number of active Threads: 337

Number of Posts: 1637

Sign up qualifications and information:

Piet Vair discussion group update, notes on joining

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Above, Phil Maxson with his Corvair powered 601 XL at Corvair College #24 in Barnwell SC. Read: Phil Maxson goes to 3,000 cc for his 601XL

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Above, Terry Hand (on left) and Bob Lester at the college in front of Terry’s project Pietenpol at Corvair College #33. Read: Terry Hand’s 2700 cc Pietenpol engine – w/Weseman 5th bearing .

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Comments on aircraft accidents

Builders,

I am well known in experimental aviation for speaking of the things we can learn from accidents. I have an entire section of my website devoted to this: Risk Management reference page . Very few people in our field do this. The reluctance of most companies to comment has nothing to do with protecting their work nor our industry, it is simply the unspoken acknowledgement that very few people are listening, and altering their actions as a result of findings. I have worked in experimental aviation for more than a quarter of a century, I was trained as an accident investigator at Embry-Riddle, and the focus of my work is teaching builders, and yet I have to concede that my fellow aviation business owners are actually correct, very few people in experimental aviation are willing to alter or improve their behavior over time. They may want to read about accidents and comment on them, but the statistics say that few people are learning and changing their actions.

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If you are an individual, it doesn’t matter that 90% of people are doing what 90% have always done. This statistic is a concern of the industry, but it need have no effect on you. It applies to people who behave like a herd, but not the individual. I write the following points with the assumption that I am speaking with an individual, but the acknowledgement that this will also be seen ( I don’t use the word read here) by people of the herd who will ignore, take offence at, or misquote it. I can do nothing about that because my craft is teaching aircraft mechanics, and if my goal was to control herds, I would have been a shepherd.

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For individuals who want to learn something, the following points are based on 26 years of continuous work with Experimentals:

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Know the ” WW 100 Rule “: If the prototype breaks or has an accident before anything is being sold, that is called testing and R&D, and that is what responsible companies do; If 3 or the 5 first prototypes have accidents before getting to 100 hours, there is likely an issue with the product; If 2 of the first 10 have accidents before getting to 100 hours, you are likely looking at something about people, not the product; if 20 of the first 100 people have an issue before getting to 100 hours, then you are certainly looking at a human issue because it logged 8,000 hours for people who used it properly, and I have plenty of evidence that more than 20% of people have no judgment around planes. Read : A visit to the insane asylum .

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There will always be accidents with every plane and product, even ones with several hundred examples. Fools would have you believe this a reflection of aircraft companies randomly producing a defective mechanical devices, and that is a joke. What it actually shows is that there is a large persistent group of people who think that transition training, following instructions, biennial pilot reviews, pre-flighting and spending money where it is needed, do not apply to them. This is not unique to flying, think of anything you engage in, boating, shooting, motorcycling, eating, breathing, whatever, there are at least 20% of people who also do these activities with a willful disregard for safety. The only difference with flying is that the results make better TV news.

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The fleet of flying Corvair powered planes is about 400-500 active planes. While my original builders may be as low as 5% fools, there are strong industry records that show second owners of aircraft are a very accident prone herd. They are drawn from modern societies’ Darwin award candidates, and they are often people who thought learning enough to build a plane was for egg heads who like books. Second owners have a very high percentage of people with the pre-flight motto “kick the tires, light the fires.” These factors produce a steady flow of accidents. In most cases, if the engine is a Corvair, I will get a call from the FAA or the NTSB within 24 hours of the accident.

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Remember Martha Stewart?; most people think that she went to jail for insider trading. She did not, she actually went to jail for simply misleading (not even directly lying to) Federal agents conducting an investigation. When a billionaire can’t hire enough lawyers to keep them out of jail after misleading Federal investigators, a reasonably intelligent blue collar guy like an aircraft mechanic concludes one should only say pure factual information to Federal agents. Not only because it is legally a good idea, but it is also the ethical thing to do.

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There are rules about what you can share before the preliminary report is filed. Now, just think about how many times I have been informed about what was found, but then read stupid speculation from people on the internet, saying things I already knew not to be a factor in the accident. In the last 25 years, I am yet to see a single speculator, who was later shown to be absolutely wrong, come back on the net and admit that their speculation was complete BS.

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Random Comments on the Net: Following an accident, there will be people who always comment, and in most cases, they will not use their real name. This may be the guys friends “sticking up for him”, but you are almost certainly looking at one of three things; 1) An on line know-it-all.  2) An axe grinder trying to do some PR damage by speculation. 3) A small business competitor. (The most famous cases of this were on the Matronics/Zenith list where there were it was later shown that many of comments following accidents originated from other aircraft companies.) Anything that doesn’t come with a guys name and address, from a known person is to be considered BS.

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When there is an accident, new builders focus on it, but the time spent learning about accidents, particularly when people are just speculating, would be far better spent studying the people who didn’t have an accident. I have seen countless new guys focus on what they ‘think’ happed in some particular accident, but they can’t name a single successful builder’s plane they have studied in the same detail. This is stupid. Their time would be much better invested in learning to emulate the success of another builder who isn’t having accidents. Good flying is about patterning your success after what is proven to work. Even if a builder had a god’s eye view of what went wrong in every accident of the type of plane he is building, this still doesn’t tell him anything about what is right, only what is wrong. Study success at least as much as failure.

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Keep in mind that when you see an accident, you are arguably looking at the guy who wasn’t following procedures nor exercising good judgment. If he comes right back and says, “I f^#*ked up, let me tell you the mistake I made”, he is the total rarity that can teach you something. but far more often, the person who had an accident says nothing because they didn’t know what they were doing, or still argue that they were doing nothing wrong. A person in that position has nothing to teach you.

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After an accident, out comes the guy who met him: In many cases this speculator is the guy who knew the guy from his EAA chapter, or knew him from an airshow. Invariably the guy will include a comment like “I thought his plane was nose heavy” OK, and this is based on? Notice the guy never says “I did a weight and balance on it personally and found it to be at the front of the CG range in the drawings” it is always some random judgment, often meant to express how his own personal plane is somehow better than the one in the accident. All of these guys “just want to share facts” but in realty they don’t know what they are talking about. Even well meaning guys who post a link and say “He had an engine failure” are jumping to a conclusion themselves.

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Do you know that the FAA lists running out of gas as a loss of power? I worked for several years with the late Jeremy Monnett trying to get a category called “Gross Pilot Error” to be included in the descriptive terms because we both thought that is a better description of running out of gas than calling it a “loss of power.”

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I have written countless times that any commentary on an accident, other than a PIC report or the actual accident investigation is nothing but speculation, But this never stops idiots from doing it. Consider that both this plane: Flying Zenith 750 w/3000cc Corvair, Doug Stevenson, California and this plane: New Zenith 601 XL(B), Conventional Gear, Jerry Baak, S.C. were destroyed in accidents.  If you search the stories on websites, you will find at least 200 random speculations about what caused these accidents, mostly centered on what a terrible engine choice the Corvair is. Ready for reality? Both aircraft were run out of gas.   I flew to California and proved this on video:

http://www.flycorvair.com/stevenson.html

  The Federal investigator agreed with the conclusion. Yet not one single speculator had the self-respect to go back on any list and say “I was wrong”. You can wait as long as you like and you will not see that on the internet.

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For people thinking of speculation on vague info, consider how stupid the TV news commentator feels today about reading the “Confirmed Names” of the pilots in the Asiana 214 crash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1JYHNX8pdo

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-ww.

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Above, a 2007 picture of the homebuilt of Ken Lien of WA state. The following year, he was killed on the very first flight. You can read the story I wrote a long time later here: Risk Management, Judgement Error, money in the wrong place. By an absolute coincidence, a life long best friend of Ken’s, named Denny Jackson became my neighbor at our airport in FL just after the accident. Denny was deeply hurt by his friend’s death, and finding out that I was the ‘Corvair guy’ lead to him angrily confronting me at our EAA chapter. He was 6’5″ and 325 pounds and not to be trifled with. Because I was part of the investigation, I already knew what Denny did not: It was caused by his friend putting his carb together incorrectly, it had nothing to do with Corvair engines, yet I could not say this to him, I could only ask that he withhold judgment. Months later, Denny understood the report, came and explained that he was just hurt at the loss of his friend. I told him I might have done the same thing. We ended up as friends, spent a chunk of time around the airport together. Denny’s picture is now on our EAA chapter wall, as he was taken by cancer 3 years ago.

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Posted on

Ignition timing on Corvairs, Part 2

Builders:

Eighteen months ago I wrote a comprehensive story on ignition advance and timing on Corvair flight engines. I consider the story one of the most important and fundamental elements of mastering your Corvair. If you have not seen it in a while, or you have joined up since then, I suggest making 15 minutes in your schedule to read this and give it your full attention. The story is here: Ignition Timing on Corvairs.

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I use the term “suggest” above because I am my brother’s keeper, but not his jailer. I care about people, but I can only appeal to their willingness to learn and do a good job, their ethical responsibility as an airman to take risk management seriously. I can not force anyone to do anything with their own property. If you would like a real world example of this, we have this story from last year: Understanding Flying Corvairs Pt. #6, 98% DNA not enough. In it you can read about a person who destroyed his plane on it’s first ‘flight’,  severely injuring himself and a passenger, simply because he didn’t care to understand timing, long refused to buy a timing light, and refused to stop what he was doing when I warned him.

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For Part 2 , a slight update: On the internet, there is a suggestion being made by a non-pilot, that fliers using Corvairs should only use 24 degrees total of ignition advance on their planes, because this will allegedly make the same power as using the full advance we recommend. After 25 years of doing this, building several hundred Corvair flight engines, countless tests and having spent 5 years of my life at Embry-Riddle, I an assure builders that they should simply follow my timing recommendations for best results. To offer some further ‘why’ to expand the understanding.

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Ignition advance isn’t magic, it is Chemistry in action, particularly a branch of study in it called ‘rate of reaction.’ While I am not a Chemical Engineer, I was fortunate enough to have a number of classes with Dr. D. Cameron at Embry-Riddle, and he was an outstanding professor who really understood and could teach the physical properties of this branch, and he also knew internal combustion engines very well. This doesn’t make me an expert, but compared to a guy who slept through 9th grade Chem class, I am Alfred Nobel on the topic.

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How long it takes to burn the air and fuel in the cylinder, and thus how much ignition advance the engine needs, is a rate of reaction problem. Combustion dynamics in a real running engine are very complex, driven by the fact that once the combustion starts, the reaction itself is changing the dynamics of remaining unburned fuel and air. This acknowledged, the principles still apply, and they can be seen in action and tested easily for their proportion and effect.

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I could list 10 factors playing a role, but let’s look at just two of the ones that make using too little ignition advance an issue:

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The lower the pressure in the cylinder, the more advance it will need to make full power: Rate of combustion is greatly affected by the pressure in the cylinder when the spark happens. Three factors on this are the compression ratio, how wide the throttle is open, and what is the atmospheric pressure outside. While a max power test on a high compression engine, at sea level with the throttle wide open, may show OK results with less advance, That isn’t how planes go flying. Lower the compression to what most builders are using, understand that much of flying is cruising at part throttle, and the critical item a car mechanic never sees, the reduction of atmospheric pressure as the plane climbs, all call for more ignition advance for the engine to make best power and run efficiently.

The lower the starting temperature (given the same density)  the more advance it will need to make full power: While cold dense air burns fairly quick, cold thin air does not, and it needs more ignition advance to run efficiently. Again, this is a common factor to planes that few car mechanics consider. As a plane climbs it will do much better with even a slight increase in timing. Many people know that Klaus Savier’s Vari-eze is one of the most efficient homebuilts ever made, particularly in any contest where he can get some time at altitude, and he primarily credits his ignition that has far greater total timing than the magneto it replaces.

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There are plenty of myths about aircraft timing. I have people tell me every year that “aircraft engines all have 25 degrees advance” Really? evidently this people missed all the manufactures data working A&P mechanics use. Look at this Mandatory Service Bulletin from Continental:   http://www.tcmlink.com/pdf2/msb94-8d.pdf  Notice how the A-65’s all use 30 degrees of advance on both mags. People tell hangar stories about ‘the big bore of aircraft engines needing two plugs’ ignoring the idea that an O-200 continental’s piston is just 5/16″ larger in diameter than the one in a 3,000cc Corvair. The internet theories are endless, but mostly based on things easily disproven on inspection.

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Limited timing does appear on some other engines, like Jabarus and some VW’s, but this is driven by the mechanical design of those ignitions. Such engine are not noted for easy starting nor high altitude efficiency. Some people tout that Continental reduced the timing on O-200’s years ago, but his was actually driven by pilots using auto fuel that didn’t meet the STC requirements, and doing damage to the cylinder mounting studs on certain models. Car mechanics don’t know this, but ask anyone who flew a 150 before and after the timing reduction, and they will tell you the 4 degrees Continental ‘dumbed down’ the engine made a power difference.

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On it’s face, saying the Corvair makes full power at 24 degrees doesn’t make sense. What would GM, the original manufacturer use far more advance than this if that was all it took to make full power? Even the most torque oriented Corvair engine, the 95hp model, which had a peak torque at just 2,400 rpm and made it’s full rated power at 3,600, arguably closest to the flight engines we build, used 32 degrees of total advance (with the vacuum advance disconnected). If the engine made full power with 24 degrees, GM would have made them that way.

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The only possible motivation for a car mechanic to recommend using less ignition advance is if he is concerned about an engine having been assembled with substandard parts, like Chinese valves, and he is trying to convince people to lower the power output to protect the cheap parts. This also applies to telling people the engine can not fly with cht’s that touch the 400’s like this: CHT info taken from test flight of 601XL  Many of the issues where builders have been told they hurt their engine by running it to hot and be re-evaluated. There have been plenty of builders who made poor cowling choices who damaged engines, but we have positive evidence and factual data that shows the Corvair can run the CHT at my recommendations, provided of course, it doesn’t have sub standard valves in it.

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Above, a closer look at an E/P distributor in my distributor machine ( circa 2008). The machine has a large electric motor inside that spins the distributor. I have made hundred’s of Corvair ignition systems over the years.

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From  Ignition Timing on Corvairs :

“If a builder reads and follows the directions, he has mastered level 1). If he reads, considers and understand this story, he has moved his understanding up to level 2). Does he need to know more than this to effectively use the engine? No, but if he would like to know far more, it is one of the things I have a good understanding of in engines. This did not come from years of being a mechanic. The further understanding came from a number of years in Engineering classes at Embry-Riddle, Particularly the Chemistry classes. While the subjects we studied were academic examples for almost all of my younger classmates, I was 26-28 years old then, and the information was enlightening when I had a sudden understanding of combustion dynamics that I had observed for years in automotive racing, but didn’t have a detailed view of how the factors worked together, far less that you could make calculated and predictable changes.”

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Above, as you see it, this is a non-running model, but it has a serious purpose. The red parts you see are plastic, and were made for us by Corvair/Panther builder Paul Salter. Read the story here: Ignition system, experimental “E/E-T”

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