AOPA Sweepstakes Tiger Receives First Dual Electronic Ignition for Certified Airplanes
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ต.ค. 2024
- Electroair delivered a second electric ignition for the AOPA Sweepstakes Tiger. That means no more magnetos! The company just received an STC from the FAA for the installation, a first in the industry for certified airplanes.
Electroair also received the STC to replace the single drive Dual magneto; can't wait to install it in my Commander 114!
Had an electroAir on one side of my Cardinal engine and it ran like a Swiss watch, until it burned through the plug wires or the plugs themselves every month. It works great for about 30 days then your trouble shooting the arcing problem over and over and over throughout the year. Got tired of it and went back to all mags.
Yes my experience also with the Electro Air, it was a far worse experience than installing the Surefly Magnetos. Its too bad that Brigs and Stratton can figure out simple electronic ignition but some how these manufactures have to make the stuff so complicated with altitude spark advance etc that the mags just fail. We have close to 50 aircraft in our fleet, have tried numeros times but with no reliable sucess unfortuatly. The claims to them sound impressive but are well suited for a private aircraft owner who puts on 5 hrs per year.
Oh, no!!! I have a '76 with the A1F6D, so this came up as the only option for dual mags.
I would be very very skeptical of installing this on your aircraft I have installed the Electro Air single mag, on numerous flight school aircraft and had nothing but constant issues with it and went back to slick mags. Eventually I had installed the Surefly magneto and installed 10 + units and they never made it 200 hrs before giving issues of rough running engine. It baffles me that these get approved as Ive had nothing but problems with them on aircraft. The Surefly has issues running 24 volts but on a 12 volt system it works better but still not flawlessly. The issue also we had with Electroair was that the bendix or ACS ignition switch caused the mags to run rough. The company suggested toggle switches but replacing this is not allowed in certified aircraft. I will buy another electronic ignition switch when they have been in use for a few years and have worked out the kinks. Not being a ginny pig wasting countless time and money on these systems again. Buyer beware in my oppinion.
Ah yes but can it handle a commercial environment? I’ve dealt with what I thought was electroair in my early years and most recently surefly, those things were kinda turdish. The surefly literally uses a $50cdn automotive distributor coil assembly and has had very few last on 24v aircraft, the last one failed with I think less than 1000hrs after it’s ignition sequence failed and that one I marked as one of the two successes. Surefly went on about dirty aircraft voltage and how the old birds can have voltage fluctuations in excess of 35v, this isn’t true but they came up with a disgusting fix in the pc17v which was to step down voltage from 24 to 17 and included a massive paintball air tank sized capacitor. This also didn’t work, so on a “new” B revision of the sim4p it was to have integrated systems to handle voltage exceeding 35v, and that also didn’t work even in conjunction with the pc17v.
I personally found wider gaps on the spark plugs helped the ones that struggled for a period of time, but I got the sense that support had no idea what was going on as they claimed in the install manual that stock aviation spark plug gaps are acceptable and aircraft system voltage wasn’t an issue. I personally think for now electronic ignition would be better suited for consumer market on 12v aircraft as the components are primarily automotive and don’t appreciate 24v systems and it’s been costly using $2800 components that get swapped out with $3200 slick magnetos after a measly 200 hours of operation.
Hope you guys got it right this time, but last time while I never had to touch them first hand I did have to sweep a lot of hair off the shop floor from frustrated colleagues.
Congratulations on getting rid of the magneto. Magneto's should have been retired in the aviation industry loooooong ago.....
Another 50 years and the gasoline engines will have FADEC controls. :-)
Given the criticality of electricity supply both for ignition and navcom use, I think we should start equipping aircraft with a dual bus electrical system that can supply power in an emergency to all the electronics independent of the main electrical system. Cirrus uses this type of system already.
Now if we can get to full Fadec engine control, eliminate mixture adjustments and prop speed levers.
@@billmoran3812 Full FADEC for gasoline aircraft engines already exists. The Lycoming engines standard on the Tecnam P2012 are full FADEC.