Diesel Air http://www.dair.co.uk/
British company with a two cylinder four piston Jumo style two stroke. The website has not been updated in 6 years so not looking good.


Zoche Aero Diesel http://www.zoche.de/
Two stroke diesel in radial format. Four con-rods attach to one crank pin. No master rod needed.
Dry sump with small blower and turbo. Original used the small blower as compressed air starter. 4 cylinder single row or 8 cylinder double row. 2.5 litre made 150bhp @ 2500 rpm. Rev that to car diesel speeds and it would be making 100bhp per litre. Add modern controls and it could double again. Not with aero reliability (of course) but the potential is there.
The company used a lot of EU funding then went quiet. Sad because it sounds great on the test bed.


Delta Hawk https://deltahawk.com
Inverted V four two stroke supercharged and turbo diesel.
3.3 litre 180BHP There is no crank case compression so "bottom" end is dry sump lubricated. Air is blown direct into the cylinders from blowers. the same ides used in a car engine would be extremely powerful. Aircraft sacrifice all out power for uber reliability.
Same power potential as the Zoche and they seem to have gone into production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnbxkXbbvIk

180 bhp is good power for a GA engine.

I’ve been looking at the possibility of building a Vans either Rv7a or RV10 the kit prices are high but doable maybe £16k for the kit which you can buy in parts and build in your own time. The major down side is the engine and the propeller, engines all seem to be about £45k upward and the propeller anything up to £10k. Then there is having the space to build it and the time (likely a couple of years) my flying club has a few builders with plenty of experience and sometimes there is space to build when someone finishes a project. It’s just the engines they are so expensive way over and about what you’d pay for even a high powered car engine. So in your searching if you find a nice diesel that’s actually a reasonable price, let me know !!

https://www.vansaircraft.com/

There's a guy down my way who has a fully built plane same type as the TV series "A Plane is Born" with Mark Evans. I think he has the same Rotax engine. He has never flown it. I think all the effort of building it and running his business he lost interest. It looks complete but you's have to ask him. PM me if you want me to put you in contact.


One of the Delta Hawk videos mentions costs for the whole firewall forward package.

Opposed pistons are not a new idea, but like most things, later development makes it work better and can become lighter.
My first experience of an opposed piston diesel was in Commer TS3 trucks, around 1972-5. The garage I worked at had a customer with two of these as a small haulage business. My main memory was the noise, they used to scream, even tickover was a whine, which just rose and fell with the revs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commer_TS3
(Hover over "opposed piston engine" in the first line of the "Layout" section for an animated diagram. Only one crankshaft and rockers connecting to the pistons. Two crankshafts geared together seems better.)

Diesels lend themselves to two-stroke as only air is drawn in, so can be achieved with a compressor of some sort, negating the need to run the air through the crankcase.

DaveMcT said:

There's a guy down my way who has a fully built plane same type as the TV series "A Plane is Born" with Mark Evans. I think he has the same Rotax engine. He has never flown it. I think all the effort of building it and running his business he lost interest. It looks complete but you's have to ask him. PM me if you want me to put you in contact.

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I rewatched the whole plane is born series a few months back. The plane in that was a Europa which is a nice little plane, and since that show the company has moved to Norfolk and are based at what used to be RAF Coltishall. They now have a brand new model call the elite with ballistic parachute which looks very interesting

They where holding an event in duxford back in April which I had messaged Europa about and they where going to be there, however it all got cancelled. I don’t suspect at the current rate I’d get anything started for a year or two anyway.

What attracts me to the Vans aircraft is they are an all metal construction and you can buy them in parts, so buy the wings and then spend a year or so building then, later buy the tail for £2-4K and spend a year or less on that, eventually bringing all the parts together. The kit might cost £18k all in, but there are a lot of scary hidden costs, like the engine and propeller, but as you can imagine also all the radio, transponder and instruments which can be hundreds to thousands of pounds each.

The advantage of building your own or buying a kit built plane is the ability to repair and service it yourself, if it’s a factory built plane then you have to send it to an aircraft engineer for any work.

There are ways round that. Reims Cessnas where built from kits in France to technically are seen as home built.

The cost of 100LL Avgas is really high at the moment and it’s unlikely to come down. Emissions are not such a big concern in general aviation as anything that flies if going to pump out a lot of co2, but diesels will lower emissions, however the main reason for them is their ability to run on multiple fuels which may be a problem if you live in north or South America or the outback of Australia where you maybe can’t afford to be fussy with an exact fuel type in a rural location.

It’s kinda cool because that was exactly what Rudolph Diesel designed it for, where as diesel car engines these days are very fussy.

I may take i you up on your offer to be put in touch but it’s a long way off at the moment

The standard 2-stroke pulling through crank case has a considerable pumping load, but the losses fall away and power goes up when the harmonics kick in.

Using a constant volume crank case (V4 or Square 4) would allow normal two stroke cylinders with air blown through the engine. Reed valves on direct-to-cylinder inlet ports allow the crank case to be separate (dry sumped). They can be petrol or diesel and run very clean especially, diesels. Petrols benefit from variable exhaust port valves, diesel perhaps less so.

The Rotax E-Tech is a super clean 850cc direct injected two stroke used in the Skidoo and Evinrude outboards. It beats the stringent USA EPA emissions rules and actually does better than the competing 1200cc 4 strokes. It's better on fuel than the competition and costs less in maintenance. Rotax say they went two-stroke because it was easier to meet the demanding cold start emissions limits.

AndyRKett said:

I may take i you up on your offer to be put in touch but it’s a long way off at the moment

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The guy runs a local car service garage. A couple of years ago we talked about his experience building it. I suspect he was still emotionally attached but had developed a love/hate relationship with the project.

I’m not surprised composite plane require every pot of glue to be mixed up perfectly, brushed on perfectly and then pressed in place perfectly. You definitely have to have a certain mind set to be that finicky.

Any mistakes and it’s there forever.

That means your mistakes become part of the plane forever and you give up your soul to building it, I’m sure one day he plans to fly it but maybe he’s too traumatised from the building process.

He's more Allen Millyard than totally aero anal. But obviosuly has to follow the rules. I think he got it certified as he went along. But it was years ago, so I might have made that up.

Qualcast Foundry Derby, used Commer TS3 trucks. They had a distinctive green and red colour scheme the same as their professional motor mowers. They were extremely noisy going up hill but seemed to run and run long after other companies had moved to newer trucks.


At the power station our Terex TX40 coal moving earth scrapers had twin Cummins or Detroit 2 strokes. The engine bay was huge so the Detroits looked lost down a big hole. But they were by far the most reliable and probably the most powerful. They only smoked if a mechanic over-set the fuel pump. Two Detroit strokers going full chat digging coal were an awesome sound.
These are TS14 (14 cu yards). Ours were TS40 which (IIRC) was a TS32 with raised sides for coal moving. Properly big kit.