Meet The V12 Twin Turbo Diesel Crop Duster 

There is a GREAT CD sound effects by Chuck Yeager about twenty years ago doing an instrument check before he cranks a P51f . Once controls are set flips last switches and 2500hps wake up through 12 shorty open stacks 6feet away from you,idles a bit then rolls and takes off .Each plane has it's own sound a squadron rolls by some a fast idle , the rest lope like a really fat cam 572 ci that can't run below 2500rpm. Each pilot bangs the throttle and takes off does fly by and joins formation .

oh YEAH! if we wanted music? we'd listen to pandora.

Then you have never heard the iconic sound of a T-6 with the tips of that Hamilton Standard prop tips braking the sound barrier, or that beautiful voice from a Spitfire or Mustang with that Merlin 61 or Packard V1650 at full song

Constructive criticism, no disrespect; lose the background noise. The subject & your narration of it is great! The addition of distracting, monotonous & annoying mario bros music ruined the vid for me.

Especially older guys like me, RADIALS!!

Torque is not the friend of prop driven planes

@@donkeightley8463 Yes it is. Torque X Rpm / 5,252 = horsepower. You cannot have horsepower without torque. You cannot turn a propeller without torque. The Diameter, number of blades, and RPM determine how much torque you need. You cannot even fly if your engine fails to meet that required amount of torque. Even the Merlin V-12 was geared down from 3,000 to 1,450rpm to double its torque to the propeller so it could swing a 10-12' prop.

With respect, I think we are getting torque , effect on handling mixed with torque in engine terms. This thing would be a surprise to a Cessna pilot, but not to someone used to flying what has always been a more graceful version of a tractor in the sky. That said, you blokes have balls of steel to fly the way you do. I have driven a mini Cooper at a hundred mph but am not going to go crop dusting any time soon😂

@@donkeightley8463 Yes it is. Torque is power in a propeller driven airplane. The more toque it can safely generate the better the performance.

@@donkeightley8463it absolutely is, specifically under heavy load

Actually LET Mike see this. I would like to see what prop he would match it up with on Scrappy. Or he may be interested in buyint one or two turbines off of these guys.

@@edfrawley4356 It's too heavy and it probably doesn't even make as much power as the engine that's already on Scrappy.

@@PistonAvatarGuy If I remember correctly, Scrappy is currently pulling about 600 horses, but there's no way it's putting out the 2,000 lb-ft of torque this this is making. Granted, we're comparing a thoroughbred to a Clydesdale here. Scrappy's engine would be a dog in an ag plane that needs to haul tons of weight up and around all day.

@@challengecompleted55 That's just not how hp and torque work. In an aircraft application, torque literally means nothing, and it barely means anything in any other application. The thrust produced by the propeller is directly proportional to the power output of the engine and the efficiency of the prop, it's not related to the torque output of the engine in any way. And, no, Scrappy's engine would not be a dog in an ag plane, the unmodified version of that same engine is even used in the Fletcher FU-24, which is a purpose-built ag plane.

@@PistonAvatarGuy torque literally means nothing in almost every application? Take a 400hp 5.7L hemi and stick it in place of a 400hp 14L Cummins in a heavy truck and try towing and let me know how little of a difference torque makes. HP is litterally torque multiplied by rpm. You need a balance of both but torque is far from unimportant in airplanes or otherwise... remember "HP is how fast you hit the wall, TORQUE is how far you take the wall with you"

500 hp not enough diesel to heavy

​@@tgh223its probably making 1500 ftlb of torque it's got lots of power

@@tgh223 But also more Fuel Efficient.

@@tgh223 nope, it's not "too heavy". you have to look at the package weight for a given mission. So usually it is powerplant plus fuel. Turbines lose out to piston in the efficiency department at lower altitudes because of the relatively high fuel burn by comparison. In this application with 6hrs of fuel it might just be light enough to be competitive. Also take into account that the propeller and the engine cost only a fraction of what a turbine costs. You could probably get the price down to the cost of a hot section inspection and rebuild, so it essentially becomes a throw-away-engine for a commercial operator.

@@tgh223 How does it feel to be so wrong?

Yeah, it looks like a custom job based on the same ideas but with the dohc m57

off road and un taxed!

That's why I'm running my old diesel with highly filtered sump oil with a touch of petrol to thin it out for the stator motors sake

it's NOT a diesel engine, it's a compression ignition engine designed for aircraft

@@DSAK55 You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. The definition you gave in your comment is EXACTLY what makes it a diesel engine, and it running on Jet-A/A1 or diesel kind of gives that away. I've been an aircraft mechanic both in and out of the military for close to 30 years and have worked on standard recips, turbines, and aviation diesels and there is little difference between them and auto diesels except, well they are WAY more reliable than auto diesels. haha

@@ImpendingJoker Are you aware that when Rudolf Diesel invented his engine there was no diesel fuel. You could call his invention the peanut oil engine

​@DSAK55 it's almost like the diesel engine was named for the diesel cycle of thermodynamics rather then the fuel. In theory any compression ignition piston engine is a diesel regardless of fuel source

From a car guy perspective, it’s very cool! I did a promotional piece for these guys for the convention which is how I found out about it

The biggest thing holding them back is that diesels are a lot harder to make high revving compared to petrol engines which is more important then the added power a diesel can give. Which is why most aircraft that arent for personal use dont use piston engines in general they use some for of jet, even propeller aircraft use jets to spin the blades as they use less moving parts can rotate a lot faster and produce a lot more power (and use a lot more fuel).

For small, slow planes diesels can make sense since small turboprops are very inefficient. For bigger power turboprop efficiency gets close enough while being smoother and much lighter.

The smallest firefighting airplanes run engines with 3x the HP of this 500HP diesel. This is a pretty small modern ag plane.

For sure. Probably a very expensive part, though.

@@SolarWebsite bespoke carbon fabrication is pretty time intensive. Cool as though. Bet it’s a feather

Not much demand for piston engines on new ag planes anymore. Their place is in the market replacing 1340’s on older planes. Majority of ag planes in my area are 802 air tractors now. We do a massive amount of dry fertilizer work here and they need all the power they can get hauling big loads of fertilizer. A piston engine can’t deliver that power without adding too much weight.

@@boomerang379 That makes perfect sense. There's still a lot of nostalgia to seeing and hearing an old 600 or 450 round engine ag-cat going through the paces. The turbine Thrush and Ag-Cat see a lot of work still. What about the Turbine "fat cat" that can carry 500 gallons per load?

@@boomerang379 You have to consider the fuel quantity also. A turbine engine uses more fuel, so for a diesel piston engine you can make up for the extra engine weight by carrying less fuel.

It's not that pistons engines aren't in demand today, it's that there aren't really any good piston engine options. Your choices are what, a radial or a different radial? Those things are getting old and aren't being made anymore, so their days of reliable operation are closing fast. This engine will fit certain operators, not everyone has the work (or can afford) spending $1.5M on an 802, even though it's one of the most efficient ag planes out there as far as acres covered. If your operation only encompasses enough work to justify a single plane running a radial, then this 301 might fit much better than a 402 would. I've seen two operations nearly go under because they bought bigger airplanes than their area could handle. Right now I'm in a position on deciding whether I can find enough work to replace my 502 with a 602, there's just no way I'd be able to justify buying even a worn out 802 for my area. One other factor...that massive endurance is something very few turbine ag planes have. It's not really a benefit to most operators, but if your stuff is really spread out and you end up running out of fuel before chemical, this might be the ticket to make an uneconomical area feasible again. Low volume applications almost always end up being limited by fuel capacity rather than hopper capacity, so if you're spraying 1gal or less, this could potentially be more productive per hour than something like an 802 that might need to head back for fuel twice as often. If this engine was scaled up to 700-800HP, it might even replace a lot of turbines flying in ag today. What's going to ultimately decide whether this engine succeeds or not is the maintenance and parts availability, future support, and overhaul costs. If you have to shut down because the FADEC or whatever component is acting up and you need to send it to Germany for repair, it'll never succeed. GE was trying to get into the ag plane market with their turbine, and while it was a great engine, they wouldn't let anyone else work on it but them...which meant you were shut down until you took your engine off and sent it off to them for repair. Later on they started doing a loaner engine program to keep planes going, but that was a bandaid fix that never solved the problem. GE engines are regarded about as well as herpes these days, even though the engines themselves were on par if not better than a PT6. Orenda/Trace tried a big block V8, they lasted for quite a while but died off for similar reasons...lack of support and constant little teething problems that they never really fixed. If RED can address those problems, you'll likely see a lot more of these engines on yellow airplanes in the future.

@@Skinflaps_Meatslapper You don't want something that is going to be high failure rate. What if the engine dies 8n flight?

Run off road red diesel...I mean....really off road......

@@JohnSmith-yv6eq The only difference between offroad diesel and diesel #2 is the tax stamp, and the dye. If you're getting furnace waste oil as offroad diesel, you need to buy your shit from a better supplier.

Same

I would thing an ag plane has a wide cg.

I too am a retired master aircraft mechanic and I have worked on several different ag planes and they have no empty weight cg.

@@gmanchurch not contesting you, just trying to get clarification but how do they handle weight and balance calculations then? I never worked ag planes, just light general aviation 6 passengers or less, building several experimental kits (two passengers) plus working at Repair Facilities doing aircraft appliances (hermetic fire extinguishers and inflatables [Commercial: escape slides, life rafts and heli floats] ). Just relocating a battery can be problematic and look at how many crashes there are when a baggage compartment moves the CG aft. I On the experimental kits, based on the actual engine option used it could drastically change flight safety dynamics with just fractions of an inch forward or aft engine placement and before the FAA inspector signed off I had to show him all the weight and balance calculations. SOMETHING has to be done to compensate for the different engine so how are ag planes different physics?

Av gas has been a scam for 80 years because of the Av unions. The US av industry propped up gasoline tech in Av engines to keep unionized workers employed and busy all the time servicing these obsolete gas engines.

The turbine engined versions of this are even more powerful. Air tractors carry a stupid amount of payload so there's a good reason they have so much power

The engine they ripped out would've been a 750hp, with the amount of money these planes are making per flying hour I'm not sure this type of huge swap is really worth the $$ compared to running it as a turbo-prop. Cool though

@@Eclipse1719 the top spec r1340s are 600hp. They'd be using a lot more fuel from drag with the frontal area of a radial (not to mention spray pattern). Overhaul interval on an ag plane 1340 is 1000hours. On this diesel they are saying 2000 - 4000 hours. In short, there's plenty of benefits for this engine.

Diamond uses diesel engines in many of their aircraft

Jet A is just high grade diesel and there's a whole lot of aircraft out there burning Jet A.

Jet fuel is literally refined diesel

@@jjohnson2553 Yeah burning Jet A in a turbine. Its pretty obvious that I'm using the word 'diesel' to refer to a piston engine, why else would I be mentioning 'V12'?

Ever heard of the WW2 Junkers Jumo engines? Check them out.

Thanks! It truly is so much fun to get to do what I do!

It's always been a thing in the rest of the world. The American Av gas thing is just because they want you to have to service your aircraft engine every 150-200 hours to keep unionized Av gas techs busy all the time. The maintenance costs of having to change spark plugs every 400-500 hours, valve adjustments, and oil changes because your gasoline engine dumps fuel into the oil to keep the cylinders cool, is astonishingly high. Gasoline engines are obsolete, yet will never truly go away in America because of how industry has propped up gasoline engines.

This is true but were there is a Diesel engine there is a turbine that can make more power, torque and better reliability due too the very few moving parts also diesel would have hard time operating at higher altitudes. And turbines can practically run off anything that burns that being said diesels do have better fuel economy at low power

A turbine dosent require any electrical power to run, my turbine has a mechanical fuel pump And a small generator for all the gauges. The throttle is also fully mechanical the only power needed is for start up. It actually dosent use any power one started

@@bolt2510correct, many smaller / simpler turboprops do not need any electrical power to run once going. And they are lighter than diesels… The main issue here is cost per hour. Western made turboprops simply cost a lot. That plus range are the only real benefits of diesel.

Any carburetor equipped aircraft gas engine does not require electricity either, they get their spark from 2 magnetos with 2 plugs per cylinder and 2 electrodes per plug. So 4 electrodes, and two separate ignition systems per cylinder. Being Diesel making more torque is only true because they can tolerate more boost. Apples to apples, with equal manifold pressures Diesel always comes up the looser, especially at low rpm. The main advantage is fuel efficiency. A GMC V6 478 ci N/A Diesel makes 170 hp and 266 ftlb @ 2000 rpm. The same engine as a gas engine with 7.5:1 cr and a 2 bbl makes 254 hp and 442 ftlb at 1400 rpm, is 150lb lighter, cheaper, simpler, and lasts just as long. But the gas engine got 7 mpg empty, the Deisel 28 mpg! But, it didn't have the power to replace the 478 gas engine, it replaced the 305 ci in HP. This is pretty typical. Adding a turbo to make up the difference in hp exacerbated the bottom end torque problem in service because now you installed it into a vehicle that needed 254 hp not 170 and trying to start a load required winding the crap out of it and waiting to get boost. The gas engine you dumped the clutch and let it lug up from about 350 rpm. The diesels fell flat on their faces and stopped turning at 800 because of having to bring up the pistons against 17:1 cr. True in every engine of similar ci or HP. Big ole gas luggers get down on their knees and PULL and have every bit as much durability. I have had some still pulling when the electric tachometer stopped reading! That's why large heavy duty gas engines weren't replaced as soon as the Diesel was invented. Until gas prices went up they were heavy, expensive, low revving, requiring more gears in the transmission, and had much narrower powerband. However, this is an amazing aluminum 372 ci V12 making 550 hp maximum takeoff. It has a continuous rating of 460hp. And weighs 800lb They are planning a marine version at 700hp at only 3900 rpm! When he says "torquey" he means throttle response compared to a turbine, very important in a crop duster these guys pull high Gs hundreds of times a day.

There's no way someone is going to make a completely mechanical diesel fly.

and always!!!👍

The old warbirds were all huge gasoline burning V12s though, fuel consumption for an Allison V12 at max power was in the neighborhood of 160GPH, as opposed to 25 here. Granted this diesel makes a third of the power the Allison did but still. It's nearly 5x as fuel efficient

@@GMdrivingMOPARguy Junkers was working on turbo diesel V12s for the Germans during WW2, had they had the resources and materials to produce them in large quantities, we probably would be speaking German today. Just food for thought. Turbo diesel aviation engines aren't something new, they've always been a thing for 80 years. The Av gas industry just propped up gasoline garbage engines to keep their unionized employees employed and always busy servicing the Av gas engines.

Jim mills terre haute Indiana yep crazy bastard he is....

Turbo beaver... I've got to file that one away

What's the origin of this powerplant? Is it a bespoke design, or is it the same unit Audi used in the Q7 SUV a decade or so ago?

​@@richardharrold9736it was designed by an immigrant from russia. They are putting it into yak-152 and a military drone that never flew .

That's what I was hoping for too

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qyyvwitOigQ.html

Is this based on the Audi Q7 TDI unit?

Rudolph Diesel enters the chat...

@@JohnSmith-yv6eq *Preußens Gloria starts playing*

Haha, yeah, big V12 up front. Except the early Merlins had 1000-1200 HP and the late-war versions touched 1800 HP. The difference of course is a) type of fuel and b) life expectancy/reliability. If the plane you put it in is expected to be destroyed before it has flown 100 hours on average, no need to build the engine to last 2000 hours 😉

You only get 2 MPG"?

He said 21 gallons per hour not 21 miles per gallon. I don't think you could drive your Jeep hard or fast enough to consume 21 gallons per hour. Maybe if you did the Rubicon trail

@@jacobmoses3712 21gph, 155mph, ~7.4mpg. It gets roughly the same mileage I used to average in a 1979 Lincoln Mark V.

You the man

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qyyvwitOigQ.html

Plus vibrations from diesel is more.

The diesel was type approved by EASA about 10 years ago and the specs put the diesel at around 100lbs lighter than the 1340. This could be a winner for utility aircraft.

@@studiotube6033 It was type certified for this aircraft?

@@studiotube6033 The weight savings in fuel is also that much more that can be put in a hopper. I don't know what pesticides weigh per gallon but it's going to have to be close to a 1 to 1 trade I'd think.

@@nickidewet7711 That's why it has a carbon fiber prop, he mentions the leading edge material but not that it's basic construction is carbon fiber, that's the only type of prop that the FAA allows to be run on diesel aircraft engine's because that's the only material that won't crack from a diesel engine's vibrations, most likely that's also why that intake and cowling is also carbon fiber, as he says they're bolted to the engine. But, since the prop is 3× cheaper as it turns out that's a bonus (who'd have ever thought something carbon fiber would be cheaper than anything? That's gotta be a first.) I'm curious about the prop reduction gear if indeed it even has one, given diesel's generally turn so much slower than gasoline engine's and the small diameter of the prop on it I wonder if it even needs a prop reduction in the first place and if it does it's probably smaller and lighter than it's gasoline counterpart, that would explain at least partially why these engine's come in at 100 lbs lighter than what came out, being a diesel you'd think it would be heavier, although that 100 lbs probably doesn't include the weight if the cooling system and coolant, I suppose because of the variations between applications that weight is always omitted in the weight specs of liquid cooled engine's be it aircraft or automobiles and people often forget about it as a result.