HEART TRANSPLANT!

Upgrading a C182 to a 300hp Conti 10-550.

Ferreira Aviation's Stanley Schimper writes: Roelie is an avid pilot who is one of our busiest private owners, flying his much loved Cessna 182 for business and pleasure. Having known Roelie for many years, it was not strange to receive a phone call from him about eight years ago, enquiring about changing the Continental 0-470-U engine in his 1980 Cessna 182R from a carburettor to fuel injection.

ROELIE'S MAIN MOTIVATION for the upgrade was the uneven operating temperatures he was seeing after having installed a digital engine monitoring system on his 182. The cost of the upgrade was however so high, that the urge soon passed.

Knowing Roelie, we knew he wasn't going to leave it there. Sure enough, soon he started asking about an upgrade to a Continental O-520 or even to the injected IO-550 engine. At the time we were not very open to the idea as a similar project to fit a 182 with the O-520 did not yield the advertised results and ended up being a disappointment to the owners.

However Roelie doggedly persevered with his vision to have a 300HP 182. He continually weighed the options and crunched the numbers around his big dream. And then he came across an article on a IO-550 conversion in a Cessna Flyer magazine from 2016. He made contact with a US company called Air Planes, located in Kansas.

With referrals from Air Planes, he contacted customers that had done the conversion. They all confirmed that the numbers published by Air Planes were correct - something uncommon for many aftermarket STCS sold around the world. Most seem to end up with less than advertised.

A large part of the consideration was the speed gain vs. the fuel consumption. Flying around 300hrs per year, Roelie came to the conclusion that he would gain around one year's worth of additional flying over the life of the engine with the same costs.