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I am just trying to understand the diesel engines market-share in the piston airplanes market. Any experience or idea about that ? Just to understand if it is 1% or 10% or more.

Thanks in advance for whom will reply to me.

JT77

JT77
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It's about 5%, very approximately, but might be approaching 10% in the EU.

https://www.experimentalaircraft.info/homebuilt-aircraft/aircraft-diesel-manufacturers.php - overall list
https://www.continental.aero/diesel/diesel-engines.aspx - Continental advertises 7500 diesels installed, and they're the main player.

There's 200k GA aircraft in the US, about 130k are single piston engine, or 140k total piston. That's the largest market by far. So the numbers come out to 5 and up to 10% of piston-powered GA aircraft being powered by diesels.

No particular reason. Nothing wrong with them. They work great. Range is much better, fuel's half the cost per mile, weight increase is similar to fuel weight decrease, noise is bad for both diesel and avgas.

It's just that so many GA airplanes have already been built with avgas engines. And new planes are expensive just for being new. Retrofits cost money, one needs a solid reason to do it, just saving on fuel isn't always enough.

Therac
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  • Why are new avgas planes still quite common? – Someone Sep 08 '23 at 16:32
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    @Someone Inertia, maybe image of car diesels as "cheap and noisy" (in aviation, low air density makes forced induction much more useful), slightly better hp/lbs ratio on the ground for avgas engines. Maybe other things. New engines run fine on mogas, though, they don't need the expensive and poisonous leaded version, and injection narrows the gap somewhat. Diesels still win on efficiency by a good margin. – Therac Sep 08 '23 at 16:39
  • Thank you so much Therac for the information! Really appreciated. – JT77 Sep 11 '23 at 11:55