Motor-glider Unreliability: Examples, Systemic Problems, Ideas (2020 SSA/OSTIV Convention )

Motorgliders are horribly unreliable. When the motor runs and nothing breaks, we are justifiably astonished. We do post-flight inspections just so we have a prayer of the thing working next time. The high accident rate shows pilots don’t treat landing as plan A, because the motor works just often enough that we’re tempted to rely on it. Electrics are offered as a panacea but they have plenty of problems too. We will review some of the systemic problems that guarantee we have unreliable machines, with plenty of example failures, and offer some ideas and areas of research to potentially improve general reliability.

Speaker Bio: Dave Nadler

Dave has flown 4500+ hours in sailplanes (including 2100+ in motorgliders), mostly competition and cross-country. Owning motorgliders has taught Dave the true meaning of patience.

In soaring circles, Dave is best known as the principal designer of the popular ILEC SN10 integrated flight computer system, flown by thousands of pilots worldwide, in everything from Blanik trainers to super-ships in the world championships, and in 20 different countries. Dave was also one of the developers of PowerFLARM.

Professionally Dave has spent much of his career as consultant, with stints leading teams of up to 250 engineers, building lots of products, and in many “fix this mess” roles resolving technical and management problems.

Slides for this presentation are available here:
http://www.nadler.com/public/NadlerSo...