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Aviation History
1987
1987 - 0023.PDF
Porsche: the warm-up lap is over Fifty miles south-west of Stuttgart lies the quiet airfield of Dona- ueschingen. It is inconspicuous, and the small hangar adjacent to the tower looks like the last place you would expect to find one of today's most interesting general-aviation development pro grammes. This is the flight-test centre which Porsche is using in its bid to set the standard for small power units to the end of the century and beyond, and so win a major slice-of the light aircraft engine market. Company founder Ferdinand Porsche developed his first aero-engine as far back as 1909, for an early airship. He later went on to develop a range of high-performance cars, tanks, and vehicles. Now under the direction of managing director Peter Schutz, himself a keen pilot, the Porsche company has spent the last five years and a large but undisclosed sum of money developing the well-known 911 sports car engine for aviation use. Designated PFM.3200 (merely indi cating that it is a Porsche Flug Motor of 3-21it capacity), the basic normally- aspirated six-cylinder engine comes in two versions, a 210 h.p. model with a 9-2:1 compression ratio, cleared for use with both avgas and mogas, and a 217 h.p. version for the US market with modified pistons, a 10-5:1 compression ratio, and restricted to avgas. Both feature single power-lever control with automatic man- FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL, 4 April 1987 The Porsche PFM.3200 engine, featuring single power-lever control, is now in production. Robin Blech reports from West Germany, and handles the engine in the company's Mooney 23-1. Photographs by Janice Lowe. agement of mixture and propeller pitch. The engine won West German type certification to JAR-E in 1984, and FAA type certification to FAR Part 33 in 1985. It goes into series production this month. Initially 110 examples will be built. Some 16,000 test hours have already been logged on the engine, and a 600hr world flight in a Porsche-powered Mooney 231 attracted wide publicity a year ago. That flight was judged a major success as much for public relations as for any technical merit, despite an engine failure in Africa owing to contamination of the fuel injection system during maintenance, an unfortunate occurrence unrelated to the reliability of the powerplant itself, and the only case of engine failure encountered, say Porsche. Fast, quiet and responsive—the Porsche- powered Mooney 231 A 245 h.p. turbocharged engine is now being developed, and this is presently installed in the company's Cessna 182 testbed. Certification of this engine is expected in September, with series prod uction a year later. Two hundred flight hours and 600 hours of ground testing have been completed. Porsche has chosen a tough time to enter the aviation market. Its early predic tions were based on volume sales to Piper and Cessna, but both of these companies have suspended manufacture of light piston-driven types. The retrofit market, originally seen as a minor slice of the cake, has taken on a new significance. Despite the gloom among GA manu facturers, Porsche has already sold 50 of this year's planned output of 110. A Cessna 172 retrofit programme was due to start this month, subject to West German special type certification (STC). French STC is expected to follow soon after. STC in the USA is scheduled for November, and will be for a Cessna 172. The programme for Cessna 172 and 182 tests is the same. The PFM.3200 is not cheap. The current price is DM45,000, but the price with all ancillary systems except propeller and exhaust system is 30 per cent higher. Retrofitting a Cessna 172 will come out at between DM80,000-90,000, some 2| times higher than the cost of replacing a Lycoming or Continental. Porsche claims
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