RivetBangers.com

Larry was kind enough to post some RV accident stats...

l & d lewis wrote:Here's the sort of official skinny of RV accident reports 2000 to present, total amature built aircraft accidents 985, RV's 99.

One of the things that struck me in Larry's post was the number of 'loss of engine' accidents. I see reports at work on GA engine failures, and my completely unscientific observation is that homebuilts builders seem to have an abnormally high number of problems in this area.

That also checks with something Tom Green at Van's said to me, which in effect was that losing an engine was one of the big killers in RVs.

So for those of you who have a finished, flying RV, what have your engine experiences been? What problems are we missing here? I wanna know now while the engine installation is still (far) in the future for me.

Dave

PS - Sorry Spike, maybe this should go in the "Engines" forum - but I wanted it to be a general question not tied to a specific motor.

No problemo Thermos, this place is as good as any other as I think it will have wide reaching content.

I too have thought about this very question. It seems that most of the new aircraft hardships that I have heard about have been engine related. I am lucky enough that one of the homebuilt council members is a very active member of my EAA chapter. He had an interesting statistic that most homebuilt accidents happen within just a few hours of first flight. I believe it was something like 7 or 14. I believe that engines are definately an area where conservatism is greatly justified, especially with respect to the fuel system. It seems to me that the fuel systems that we install seem to be subject to many "bright ideas" and variances.