nitpick

The development of the cheap digital borescope has been a godsend to the industry. There is absolutely NO reason not to borescope every cylinder and develop a digital photographic record at every 50-hour plug rotation/cleaning. A simple picture of each piston crown and every exhaust valve face will provide "early warning" of 90% (in my opinion) of cylinder failures, comfortably before the failure would occur The other godsend is the multi-cylinder engine monitor which, together with a computer and a reasonable visualization program, can provide you with a picture of your last flight and compare that picture to previous flights -- making it easy to spot anomalous EGTs and/or CHTs on an individual cylinder basis, post-flight

Thanks, I've been writing about general aviation engines/technology for a few decades now -- you can check out my early work in back issues of the Aviation Consumer from the 1990s

Both Lycoming and Continental developed electronic engine management systems / electronic ignition for their engines in the late 1970s. Neither could find an OEM willing to put up with the added cost and complexity. Unison's LASAR system of the mid-1990s was a great system as well that could not find a market Continental developed liquid-cooling technology for its aircraft engines in the 1980s, at a cost of millions of dollars and could not find a market. Lycoming and John Deere developed the SCORE rotary aircraft engine in the same period, at a cost of nearly $30 million in today's dollars -- and could not find a market The ie2 technology is really great and I am very happy to see it on the Tecnam P2012 -- that aircraft may single-handedly bring back the piston-powered commuter airliner market. But I doubt it will be adopted by the General Aviation OEMs selling personal airplanes to the market (i.e. Piper, Cirrus, Cessna, etc.) because of ROI

Almost all of those address weaknesses of the reciprocating internal combustion engine in the automotive application -- issues such as drivability and emissions. Weaknesses that simply do not exist in steady-state, high-power applications such as aircraft application. They are fine in the automotive application but add only cost and complexity and no value in an aircraft application If they had relevance and value in the aircraft application, the Porsche PFM engine would not have been the heavy, expensive, unreliable and inefficient failure that it was

* My O-360 spends nearly all of its life at 75% power. It's made it to TBO several times. 2000 hours at an average speed of 120 miles per hour is the equivalent of 240,000 miles * All reciprocating engines are "ancient designs." There's no difference in car, boat, airplane or stationary engines in this regard. They all have crankshafts running in plain bearings with reciprocating pistons and a valve train. There's no fundamental difference between a car engine and an aircraft engine in terms of design That said, there's a ton of technology in an aircraft engine. There's a forged crankshaft that was cast in a vacuum. You don't see that in automotive applications. There are sodium-filled exhaust valves. Again, you don't see that technology in an automotive application. There are fuel injection systems, dual sets of spark plugs, crankshaft vibration (Sarazin/Chilton) dampers. Won't find those on an automotive crankshaft And, by virtue of being high-displacement, low-RPM engines they are remarkably fuel efficient -- especially when compared to automotive engines. The direct drive versions have no losses associated with reduction gearing, like in an auto engine. The lower swept area per HP output means less loss to friction, etc.