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Ted Noel wrote:
Your comments below are part of what drives me nuts in this conversation. A fuel line failure is NOT an engine issue. It is a systems issue that applies to every aircraft that ever flew (except electrics). Thus, using it as a condemnation of a one-off application is not germane to the topic.
Actually, it is exactly the issue and your not recognizing it as such makes me worry about your grasp of the problem.
The fuel system on every aircraft that ever flew was designed, tested and validated over years and decades and that validation paid for in blood and lives. If you want to take advantage of that validation, fly one of those systems. Otherwise the one-of fuel system in your one-of implementation is as untested as the engine it is feeding. You trivialize it and other systems at the peril of your life.
When you buy a Lycoming engine for your airplane or a Ford engine for your car, someone has done all the engineering including the system level engineering. Even though the engine does not come with a fuel line or electric cables, the knowledge of how to make those connections comes with the engine. When you install the engine, you are implementing an existing and validated design. You are not designing something new.
When you do a one-of design, you have to design those systems from scratch. You can learn from what Lycoming or Ford did, but it is still a new design and subject to errors, oversights and other mistakes. The more things you are designing in an implementation, the higher the probability that errors will be present in the final system and that one of these errors could start a catastrophic chain reaction.
You have talked a lot about your engine. What is your operational history? How many hundred hours do you fly each year and how many hundred hours have you flown? What are your operational results for fuel consumption, temperatures and performance?
Regards,
Hamid
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