Hi group,

Here is a man with flying experience with the T3350TC.  One thing he is
not mentioning below.  Is exhaust valves breaking up while flying over
the ocean.

Marc Joseph

Well Marc, by the time I got involved with R3350's they'd been around
for a while, so they weren't seen as anything new or innovative. In
airline service they'd acquired a less than glittering reputation,
largely due to their being flogged mercilessly to make it coast-to-coast
quicker than the competition. Long climbs in high blower to 20,000+ feet
didn't help either. About this time the gas turbine really came to the
fore -- the rest is history.

Having said all that, there was still (at the time) a niche for the
turbocompound in the ASW/maritime patrol role, where loiter capability
was the main thing and the turbocompound's low fuel consumption was
attractive. In ASW/MP operation, the engines were operated at moderate
power settings for long periods of time (20 hr+) and at low altitude.
They gave good service without many major problems in this application.
Still, unlike Bob, I don't think I'd be all that willing to entrust my
life to just one of them. As the old saying has it 'better to lose /an/
engine than /the/ engine'.

Speaking for myself, a card-carrying technofreak with major interests in
engine technology and electronics, turbocompound engines associated with
what was basically a flying electronics warehouse provided endless
opportunities to engage one's curiosity.While technically interesting,
maintaining large aircraft in truly bloody conditions was something of a
challenge and most of us wished much of the time we were somewhere else
doing something else. The winter weather in eastern Canada being what it
was, that 'somewhere else' tended to be places like Bermuda, Puerto
Rico, Key West, England... someone had to defend the outposts of the
empire.

I later got involved in with the auto industry where a knowledge of
engine dynamics, electronics and combustion chemistry proved useful,
later branching out into gas analysis systems used in automotive,
process control, scientific and environmental applications, where a
knowledge of etc.

The upside of my involvement with R3350's is that nothing since then has
ever seemed too complicated or too difficult. I would have liked to
maintain my connection with large aircraft engines, but living in a very
quiet area of outer suburban Melbourne makes this impractical. Instead,
I restore and operate 50s/60s avionics used mainly for amateur radio and
gee-whiz purposes. This includes rolling my own 115V/400 Hz power using
rotary inverters, satisfyingly noisy and inefficient devices.

John Mackesy