BurnieM

Can someone post a picture of the existing setup ?

Road motorcycles generally have paper air filters while offroad motorcycles generally use foam soaked in oil. I have seen thousands of motorcycles including hundreds at competition events. Over 40 years I have never seen a motorcycle air filter on fire.

I think it is misleading to say that an air filter originally designed for use on motorcycles should not be used on planes. All the different brands of oil filters I have cut open are low quality, mass produced products. This is generally acceptable on all engines as they do adequate filtering at this quality level. The retail price these oil filters are sold at varies enormously. Branding appears to mean very little. I have replaced 40-50 sets of sparkplugs on motorcycles and the occasional car. I eventually settled on NGK as they (in my experience) never failed and lasted well beyond their stated design life. I have only had 2 sparkplugs fail completely; one was a Bosch 20 years ago and the second was a Bosch 2 years ago. While Bosch may produce reasonable quality in other components I have no faith in any of their spark plugs. Many (most?) decisions on replaceable engine components are not made by engineers, they are made by accountants and lawyers.

I understand this approach and it works if you already have the funds for full product development. Does not work if you are trying to raise funds for development. So we are in wait and see mode now, with no purchases from retail customers.

What does a patent search reveal ? To meet their claims I would expect a lot of new patents. If they do not exist then they are probably reworking existing technologies which implies smaller gains in capability. Not to say that they may not have some good ideas but I am guessing that they are much earlier in the development phase than they would like us to believe. Perhaps the hype comes from fund raising to actually develop the product ?

I have a few hours in an Evektor Harmony wth a 912IS so no carb heat. Occassionally when the Harmony was u/s we would use an Evektor Sportstar with 912ULS. While I was taught to use carb heat when pulling power the instructor commented that on most 912ULS the carb heat did not make much difference. He is not the only experienced Rotax user that I have heard say this.

Looks to me like the pipe is too close, more like a 12mm gap. I agree that keeping the heat away from the filter is a very good idea. A heat shield may work but would further reduce the gap. At this stage of the setup angling the pipe outwards makes more sense.

In a previously edited post I said he should be jailed (if he was not already dead). This is pretty obvious poor decision making.

Read the regs.

Appears that he had the plane for 2? years. Had a RPL but no navigation endorsement and then took it more than 25nm for maintenance. The navigation endorsement covers weather, terrain and route planning for exactly this scenario. This is pretty blatant stupidity and not the first or last time this will occur.

I am not sure that viewing crash videos when you are inexperienced will or can teach you anything more than planes can kill you. Just the basics of landing require you to learn multiple skills layered one on another and also to develop an understanding of how one skill overdone can have adverse consequences. You do not use these skills in any other area including driving cars. One instructor I know said he actually prefers students who have not learnt to drive as the skills are so different. We quickly get into the area of instructor judgement of students which is not straight forward.

https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/news-items/2025/beech-debonair-fatal-snowy-mountains-accident-entered-spiral-descent-consistent-pilot-spatial-disorientation-cloud Final report - https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2025/report/ao-2025-040

We know why it happened. Insufficient speed. Taking too long to recognise this. Applying too much elevator without applying enough power. In short lack of understanding of several forces at play and lack of understanding of multiple inputs required to recover. ie inexperience. We could argue about the instructors judgement of the students skillset/decision making but I accept this is very difficult with some low skilled students appearing fine but exhibiting poor decision making when it is all up to them.

I was always paranoid about final speed to the point I was being repeatedly told 'eyes outside'. I remember being told that as long as the nose is down your risk of stalling is low. At an early point I understood that just pulling the stick gave a small increase in height immediately followed by a significant decrease in speed. I know it is not a joke but if you did not laugh you would cry. And this will happen again.

Yep, for some reason the elevators do not work too well with insufficent speed.