AIR ENGINE WONDER.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 January 1922, Page 3

AIR ENGINE WONDER.

THREE YEARS’ QUEST. A costly three years’ scientific quest has now provided this country with a large air-cooled aeroplane engine with features that no other motor in the world can show. The small engines which cooled thenselves by spinning round and were fitted to the aeroplanes of many pioneers present formidable problems to attempts to increase their power. Yet the air, with a ’plane rushing through it, offers an ideal cooling medium for a motor; and, of course, if one can aircool it does away with the impedimenta and potential sources of breakdown involved in the water-cooling system employed at present in the most powerful aero-engines. x

The line of research has, therefore, been devoted to setting a number of large cylinders, fixed and not revolving, in a star formation, so that all of them stand well in the air flow, and to seeing whether a really powerful and reliable engine, such as is demanded for fighting or commerce, can be kept cool enough while operating at great speed simply by the flow of air round its cylinders.

How important this research has been may bp gauged when it is said that a fixed-cylinder air-coaled motor, containing 25 per cent, fewer parts than one that is water-cooled, and yet developing several hundred horse-power, can be tucked in a fighting ’plane into a space only 2 feet from front to back. Success has now been achieved and the engine is entirely British. The Bristol Company, whose efforts have had the sympathetic interest of the authorities, have recently submitted to the most searching Air Ministry trials the largest and, for its power, the lightest, aircooled motor ever built. This engine has iust emerged triumphantly from an

officially observed technical test that no other engine of the kind has survived. This test has been one equivalent to carrying eight people in a series of flights, entirely without overhaul, for 10.000 miles at a speed of more than 100 miles an hour.

The nine big cylinders of this engine develop 450 horse-power when working at 1840 revolutions a minute, and yet the engine is so light that four men can lift it.

A new fighting machine, expected to exceed in speed and manoeuvring power anything attempted hitherto, and also a British commercial aeroplane having a unique capacity for making loads pay, are to be built to take ihe new engine.