302 for airplane

Car engines suck on airboats let alone putting a 5.0L in an airplane. They don't hold up to the abuse and vibration from the prop. I truly think you would be better off trying to find a salvage plane or such and using the engine from it. my .02

What was bad about the Allisons? Not that it matters, the P-51s are awesome anyway.

why not just bolt a pratt jt8d up to er!!

It's kind of dissappointing to realize that our favorite engine may not be a good airplane engine.

It would be fairly straightforward to get, say, 225 to 250 hp at 3000 rpm, and you could focus on that w/o worrying about having to rev higher. I have seen a few v8s converted to aircraft in magazines, but I don't remember seeing a 302. I would think there would be some engineering to work out how to have a flywheel and starter, as well as mount the prop.

All that said, I read as much as possible about aircraft piston engines, since lots of things we think are recent were tried on them a long time ago, superchargers, turbos, nitrous, water injection, exhaust gas temp monitoring, etc.

It would be interesting to see the weights and layouts of some comparable piston aircraft engines, to see how they compare.

Keep us informed on how this turns out.

Most aircraft engines are very lightweight. They average 1 lb per cubic inch, the typical 4 cylinder Lycoming is 320-360 cubes. They also average about .5-.6 HP per cubic inch. The peak RPM on an engine without a reduction gearbox is about 2700-2800 RPM.

I don't really have much of an idea, but it sounds really cool!

I don't know anything about sbf's in an airplane, but Corvair engines have been used successfully for many years powering aircraft.

Can you actually get a supplement type certificate for this type of major alteration. I have a hard time believing that the FAA will sign off on this.