Pilots are a very conservative lot. They are all from Missouri.
It takes years and years of flying by hundreds of rotary powered
airplanes before the rotary will be widely excepted.

This would be speeded up if only the air racing organizations would
relax their engine limitation rules. For example the Reno race organizer
have already limited the rotary to a 3 rotor turbo version while
recently allowing piston engines up to 800 or 900 cubic inches
as I recall. This is easy to confirm by calling the right people.
That is a handicap that will be difficult to over come
with a 3.9 liter or 238 cubic inch turbo charged three rotor.
A 317 cubic inch turbo charged four rotor will be required :)
The same thing has widely happened in auto racing. In other words
there are very powerful commercial interest in play that don't
want to see the rotary succeed.

Way back in 1997 or there abouts, when Sun & Fun were running the time
to climb race Allan Tolle set the all time, time to climb from a dead
stop on the runway to 3000 feet race, time of less than a minute using
a p-port rotary powered RV4 I think. (It could have been an RV3 I
forgot exactly.) The next year the time to climb race was done away
with.  Allan also went 238 MPH in the Sun 100 Race in the same airplane.

Tracy Crook went 217 MPH in his RV4 a few years back winning his class
and and beating half of the next class up in a side port normally
aspirated rotary. Now Sun & Fun has done away with the Sun 100 race
unfortunately. If the race had been held indefinitely rotaries would
have dominated eventually as they have dominated car racing world wide
until outlawed. Mazda won Lemans outright in 1991 and then the French
changed the rules to severely handicap rotaries. Imagine what would
have happened if the rotary was allowed to dominate Lemans year after
year on a strictly displacement  based rule system. People in Europe
would start to question why their cars did not have rotaries. Billions
if not trillions  of dollars of piston engine based manufacturing
infrastructure would have been needed to be scraped.

All this has been extremely frustrating for me and a lot of rotor
heads around the world. I personally have owned seven Mazda rotary powered
cars starting in 1973. Some of them used cars with over 100,000 miles
when I bought them. Adding the miles I put on them the cars had an
accumulated  driving miles of well over one million miles. I currently
own a 2004 RX8 with 30,000 trouble free miles that gets 25 MPG on the
freeway.

The better mouse trap does not always rise to the top.

Paul Lamar ...No rotor no motor.

Some pilots may be "from Missouri," but the good ones are spiritual (or
literal) sons/daughters of West Virginia.

What is needed is for all of the rotary gurus to get together and do
some demonstrations at Oshkosh.  I don't mean flying -- people don't
think about engines when they look at wings -- but a coordinated display
of the capabilities and strengths of the rotary in relation to the
reciprosaur.

This will NOT be a "buy mine" show.  In fact, I propose that all of the
rotary gurus form the Rotary Aviation Alliance for the purposes of
promoting rotary power TOGETHER.  Show the BEST of rotary power, and
point out that there are several vendors and a few gurus, that it's not
a one-choice situation.  Provide catalogs or pamphlets from the various
vendors, but be there to demonstrate the TECHNOLOGY ("There are a number
of options, I think this one -- yes, this is the Atkins kit . . .").

Set up a pavilion show, or create your own "pavilion" where the
airplanes are, and gather as many rotary-powered birds as you can
("Oshkosh Rotary Roundup") with your demonstration on a raised stage.

Yank an engine out of a wrecked-rear RX-7 (on video, with witnesses) and
shove it into a sealed and signed case.  Take it out of the case at
Oshkosh, stick it on an engine stand and add plumbing.  Start it and get
it running smoothly, then DUMP THE COOLANT and cut off the water hoses
but LET IT KEEP RUNNING (don't shut it down until it fails or until the
show ends, if it goes that long)!  Have a big clock next to it counting
off the time until it fails, temp sensors, the whole test-bay setup.

With some reasonable publicity on, say, Saturday morning an hour after
the gates open, you can have a good-sized crowd there to watch the crate
being unsealed, engine mounted and started (this is only a 10-minute
job, done by two guys while a third makes the pitch:  "This video shows
up pulling the engine out of the car and putting it in the case . . .you
see that we haven't done anything to it . . .")

While the overheating engine is running, offer to let anyone stick a
reciprosaur next to it (put up another clock, marked "YOUR CURRENT
ENGINE" to make them think about what they're running now, and whether
it would take the abuse you're giving the rotary.

A couple of other displays would compare the two engine types, one being
a pile of all the moving parts in a reciprosaur, the other showing the
rotary innards.  This would be especially gripping if you find BROKEN
parts.  Your pitchman can hold them up and talk about "all of this stuff
that's not there to fail" in the rotary.

Have a completely disassembled rotary there for people to check out
("These are all of the parts to build the WHOLE ENGINE . . !").

Print out all of the thousands of NTSB aviation investigators' reports
of reciprosaur engine failures between 1975 and now, and bind them into
a book for visitors to read.  Do the same for all of the reports
mentioning the word "Mazda" (all 8 of them).  Point out that none of the
Mazda reports is of an engine flaw or a broken part (waving a busted
crankshaft in the air, or maybe a cylinder with a piston seized in it).

Meanwhile, you have that overheating RX engine running for all to see,
with the clock show how long it's been going (or how long it ran before
failing, if it has finally died).   Have a couple of heavy gloves for
visitors to put on and feel the lack of vibration.

THAT is how you get acceptance -- you make them worry about all those
fragile parts in their reciprosaurs while showing them the Promised
Land!  Show all of the costs to take an engine out of the car and get it
flying.  Show the rebuild parts kit and what it costs.  Compare these
costs to an O-320 purchase and rebuild.

If you think that the engine will run longer than a day, move up the day
that you start it.  Or maybe start one the first day at noon, and tear
it down after it fails then run another one for the weekend crowd.  Or
rebuild the first one in front of the crowd and give it another test!

The main thing is that the only rotaries that people see are parked, or
in a plane flying away.  Show it DOING ITS JOB where they can stand and
stare and ponder why they every thought they were better off with the
reciprosaur.

With all of the above said, I hereby volunteer to be the RAA "Rotary
Evangelist," if you and the other gurus want to set this up I can do the
planning and be the pitchman (I've done this kind of thing before and
know how to make it work).

Keith



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