Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Curtiss Wright Turbo Compound


Is this the ultimate development of the internal combustion engine? An aircooled dual row 18 cylinder radial engine, injected and supercharged. Three exhaust-driven turbines fed by 3 front, 3 back cylinders each, driving the crankshaft through fluid drives. Talk about a plumber's nightmare! They should have made a liquid cooled version, just to have more hoses and connections.
 The maintenance interval was apparently 3500 hours and in 1957 cost almost $90,000 each.  


Canadianflight.org

1 comment:

  1. Yea well at least it wasn't a sleeve valve radial! Talk about a mechanical nightmare! The CW 3350 was quite the radial engine tho, very successful in many aircraft.

    ReplyDelete