American Engineering

Listening to people complain over and over about poor American Engineering and how Americans cannot compete with foreign engineering in context of the auto industry is really annoying, especially being an engineer myself (although I'm not in the auto industry). I'm not going to get into cars now since that debate will never end. It did get me wondering how many miles my American Cessna skylane has on it. Considering American airplane companies dominate the aircraft market, that at least says something positive about American engineers.

My airplane has over 14,000 hours on it, the engine has over 2,000 hours on it, and it cruises at 133 kts true airspeed. The rough estimates say that my engine has about 350,000 miles on it and the airplane has flown well over 2 million miles! I know that comparing cars and airplanes is a poor example since much more maintenance is put into an airplane over it's lifetime, but I thought that 2 million miles was pretty impressive.

I do have all the original logbooks and the previous owners did log the segments for each flight so there is a possibility that I might actually be able to calculate a much more accurate estimate (I'll never know how many miles were travelled in holding patterns or out of the way sight seeing). I doubt I'll go through that effort since there are 60 or 70 logbooks of flights and that entering each flight would take forever.

Now I better get back to work before someone says American engineers don't work very hard...