WITH THIS ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE FOCUSING ON engines and predictive maintenance, I want to highlight the general aviation manufacturing and maintenance industry's work in these areas. There are many great engine manufacturers in the world, but I'd like to focus on two iconic piston manufacturers - Continental Aerospace Technologies and Lycoming Engines. Each company has been in business for over a century, and with that, they both have considerable collective experience and knowledge in opportunities and advancements of general aviation piston engines in terms of performance, health monitoring, and continued operational safety. Continental Aerospace Technologies, founded in 1905, has a long history of introducing safety-enhancing technologies that bring engines to market that deliver more performance, increased reliability, and limit aircraft downtime for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Continental first introduced horizontally opposed cylinder aviation engines, and new technologies such as turbocharging, fuel injection systems, balanced fuel injectors, and full authority digital engine control (FADEC) to general aviation engines. The FADEC systems in its engines radically changed the way aviation engines are maintained and support predictive maintenance practices. The FADEC is a fully redundant system that communicates with the engine many times per second to monitor essential parameters and correct operational inputs that could cause the engine to operate outside of its safe design envelope. Additionally, FADEC provides operators and pilots the opportunity to download all data accumulated during operations for analysis and depicts the performance criteria of each major component of the engine, which can help avoid the time-consuming process of a full engine examination to determine where a potential problem lies. (See more on Page 6.)
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