Aviation piston engines : flight parameter analysis

A program and tools enabling general aviation operators in our country the exploitation of the piston engines oncondition has been developed in the Institute of Aviation. Apart from the existing and strictly supervised engine manuals tasks, the program introduces, among other things, new maintenance mandatory activities like engine parameter monitoring during cruise and climb and a way of assignation diagnostic tolerance limits for them. That has never been performed in the aviation piston engines maintenance practice. In order to improve such analysis a flight data recorder (FDR) EDM 900 has been installed on the DA20- C1 „Katana” aircraft equipped with IO-240-B engine, which will allow elimination of the pilot's read errors and examination of the changes in the parameters during the entire flight. This will enable estimating if at a certain time of the flight a specified engine parameter is not exceeding the permissible values. Parameters from cruise have to be recorded in the similar range of the engine rpm’s. The parameters are oil pressure, oil temperature, cylinder head temperature, EGT, fuel flow, outside air temperature, rpm and altitude. Lower and upper acceptable limit values should be set, in which they can be contained throughout engine life. Engineers should also observe the trend of their changes. This article shows results of the aviation piston engine parameters analysis taken from FDR for ground runs, take-offs and cruise flight phases.