kmacht wrote:Right now we are left flying with the knowledge that even the factory doesn't know how to keep their engines running but somehow we are supposed to know how to keep ours from stopping on takeoff.
I'm not sure what you mean. Your engine
can stop on takeoff.
Any engine can stop on takeoff. Everyone has to accept that risk or they shouldn't fly. Anything else and I think you're deluding yourself.
I'm not going to say that I'm
comfortable with the fact that no root cause was found, of course it would be better to know what went wrong. But that happens to certified engines, too. I just read
this article about a TSIO-520 partial power loss on take-off where Continental themselves inspected the engine and concluded that it was a "failure for unknown reasons". (Mike Busch thinks he knows what happened, though.) And that was even though the factory could inspect the entire engine without additional crash damage.
Life is a numbers game. We accept certain risks in exchange for doing (or not doing) certain activities or spending more or less money. In this case it's most likely true that the risk of failure in an Aerovee is larger than in a certified engine installation. How much larger is hard to say. If nothing else, that's just from the vast number of hours accumulated on certified installs. You pay for that with a price that's about 4x higher. If you are really risk-averse, it might make sense to pay those 4x. Others may not be willing to able to do that and choose to accept the risk.
The real problem with making this trade-off is that we have such poor statistics on the reliability of experimental engines.