PWR4360-59B
Senior Airman
- 379
- May 27, 2008
Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
AAI RQ-7 Shadow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
View attachment 210890
Scale the engine up to 3,800 hp.
The two are kind of interlinked - no-one is going to fly with someone who has unreliable aircraft, but, yes I agree with your sentiment there.Commercial operators are interested in profitability, second only to not crashing.
In a number of ways, the maintenance costs are less for piston engines. When I worked for a helicopter company, we used to budget around $135 per hour for lifed items and overhaul on the 250-C20 (420 shp)(that was cheap, because we did all the work in-house) in 2008. The turbine had a heavy inspection and lifed components at 1750 hours. The compressor was 3500 hour TBOThis means things like life cycle costs, first cost of engine, frequency of overhauls, cost of overhauls, length out of service for overhaul, fuel costs, routine maintenance costs and so on.
Can you get the seals to last 3,000-5,000 hours??
TO compete in the modern world any 2,000+ HP engine is going to have to go at least 3,000hrs between overhauls and preferably closer to 5,000 hours.