Pilot Workshops Dives Into Aircraft Engine Care

Pilot Workshops has launched “Aircraft Engines: A Pilot-Friendly Manual” on September 22, adding to its series of guides for pilots and aircraft owners with a well-targeted text for aircraft engine care and feeding. The manual, available in print or eBook format, is organized by task, with descriptive photos and diagrams on each page, and written in plain, clear language making it approachable for a wide range of learning styles.

The series takes a pilot-oriented focus, and it assumes only an average layperson’s knowledge, with any background info required for comprehension of the main points residing in initial tasks and sidebars. If you come to the book with a significant amount of pilot and/or ownership experience, you may be tempted to skip over these “basics,” but they often contain tips and tricks within that may be of use—and are worth review.

With any luck, you had an instructor who took you into a maintenance hangar regularly to see aircraft engines in pieces—but if you didn’t, or it’s been a while, the opening “tour” of the engine not only re-orients you with the main components of the engine, but also gives a common reference vocabulary for them in case you learned colloquialisms, or something incorrectly. A tutorial on how to read an engine monitor hits another “Why didn’t anyone go into decent detail on that?” point. The whys and hows of many an operational myth are examined—and sometimes debunked—making for a real education for many pilots and owners.

“Aircraft Engines” can be handy for your current operational experience, and also stay with you should you purchase or rent a different airplane—and need to understand a different engine. Common guidelines for Continental and Lycoming engines are covered, with a small handful of Rotax references—as are tests you can manage as an owner to determine your engine’s health. Preventative maintenance tasks finish off the guide, giving you step-by-step instructions on how to remove the cowl, change the oil, and clean and gap spark plugs, for example. The 126-page manual is available through Pilot Workshops.