So even though the airplane is burning three or four gallons more per hour in the climb, it’s climbing faster, which cuts down on the amount of time you’re running the engine at max fuel flow. We maintained 1,200 fpm at 130 knots up through 8,000 feet and then between 800 and 900 fpm up through 16,500 feet. But it is Continental’s policy to provide an engine that is sure to produce rated horsepower, a trick it achieves by building its engines to produce a good deal more than rated horsepower. We were looking at a fuel flow of around 38 gph, which is about right for the additional 10 to 20 hp - the horsepower figure is a guess. Based on my flight, at 8,000 feet, for example, we were producing the kind of power the Tornado Alley conversion would produce at around 7,000 feet.Īs you might expect, the new engine uses more avgas on climb, but not by a lot. And as you climb to altitude, the benefit continues, as you’re able to hold a little more power every step of the way. On takeoff and climb the additional power does good things for performance, with better acceleration and very strong initial rates of climb. The climb rate with the -K model was noticeably better. Instead of an independent lever control, it uses a cam actuator in the throttle to increase the prop pitch as you push the throttle toward the stop, increasing the prop revolutions per minute to its limit of 2,700. As you probably know, the 550 model that Cirrus uses has no prop control, though it does have a constant-speed prop.
In addition to the new get-up-and-go, also noticeable was the lack of cam action toward the end of the throttle travel. In the seat was Cirrus product guru Matt Bergwall, who’d been doing a cross-continent stealth sales tour with the new airplane before its official launch and had amassed more than 30 hours in it since he’d left the Duluth, Minnesota, headquarters of Cirrus a week earlier. The SR22T accelerates more briskly than the G3 Turbo, and that’s saying a lot. I wasn’t expecting much of a difference in terms of performance from the new engine as I advanced the power on the ’22T and began to roll down 17L at Austin Bergstrom, but I was surprised right off the bat. I’ve been impressed by the performance of the GAMIjectors, but to be honest, based on my flying a similar Conti engine last year, I suspected I’d find good cooling performance from the -K model as well.
I was also curious to see how the Continental engine would deliver on the other highly touted Tornado Alley benefit, more even cooling across the cylinders through its GAMIjectors. Would the Continental turbo be more work?
I have to admit that since I’ve been flying the G3 Turbo, I’ve gotten quite used to not having to fiddle with the mixture. So I was curious to see how the workload would be with the new engine. Engine management in the Tornado Alley engine is that simple. Once you’re at altitude, you simply do what Cirrus owners refer to as “the big pull,” reducing the fuel flow to around 17.5 gph, which is the setting at which you cruise, and cruise plenty fast too, at better than 200 knots in the midteens and quite a bit faster in the 20s (where I very seldom fly). The Tornado Alley engine burns about 35 gallons per hour in the climb, though it climbs very strongly, so the total amount of time spent in climb is relatively low. Cirrus will continue to offer the Tornado Alley engine, so customers will be able to select the engine option that best suits their needs or tastes. The new engine, the Teledyne Continental TSIO-550-K, provides several very noteworthy quality-of-life, longevity and performance advantages over the Tornado Alley turbo-normalized engine and does it for the same price.
#Cirrus sr22 turbo upgrade#
While largely invisible to the naked eye, the latest improvement, the upgrade to a Continental factory turbocharged engine, is also a big deal. Most of that improvement has been incremental, with a few big exceptions, including the upgrade to the G3 model a few years back and the concurrent offering of the Turbo model, as well as the introduction of the Entegra and Perspective flight decks. Based on my experience in the airplane, I feel confident in saying that a new SR22 is a substantially better airplane in nearly every respect than the original.
I was the first journalist to fly the original SR22, and I’ve flown every new one since, some of them for several hundred hours. And I mean “mature” in the good way, you know, like expensive wine, fine Swiss watches and very fast airplanes, like the Cirrus SR22. The hope is that, as a product develops, it will mature.
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