Despite the complaints we often hear about the “outdated” technology of opposed-piston engines, the industry has found nothing decisively better with which to propel smaller airplanes. Not for lack of trying: The history of small aircraft engines—in fact, of engines in general—is a freaks’ graveyard. There have been barrel-shaped engines, spherical engines, cubical engines and disk-shaped engines, steam engines, perpetual-motion engines, engines with flaps and vanes and sliding and spinning parts in every arrangement that human ingenuity could devise and spatial visualization conceive. Invariably, their inventors asserted that they would be superior to existing engines; almost as invariably, they died in infancy.
A Novel Type of Engine Design
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