On Thursday, 30 August 2018 12:46:35 UTC+10, Charlie Quebec wrote:
In the last east issue of Gliding Australia there is an incident report shown below.
During the course of a cross country flight, the pilot elected to start the jet sustainer to self retrieve.
The engine started normally, and the pilot tracked for the home airflield The engine failed catastrophically
830ft. AGL and a safe outlanding was conducted.
Things that make you go hmmmm...

These "model aircraft engines" are used by professional drone operators for various militaries. About 10 or so years ago I visited one of those operations and the engineers were very happy with the jets compared to the two strokes they were also using. They reckoned there were fewer parts than in the carburetors of the two strokes.
Don't forget that the Solo company makes aero engines ... and garden equipment, so your Solo engined glider has an engine derived from lawnmower and leaf blower
technology and is made by a company that makes those.

I heard about that incident some months ago if it is the same one. The whole thing was triggered when farmer brought in the entire back end of the engine to one of the commercial operators at Tocumwal saying he thought it was off one of the gliders.
The guy running the op was hangaring two of those JS1s so he checked and they were OK. Called the other guy and when they opened the engine bay sure enough, no back end... also no front end, which the farmer brought in a couple of days later.
Way to go - have a flame out and don't even do a post flight inspection. Any bets on a daily inspection before next flight?

The jets are vulnerable to dirt in the fuel as the bearing lubrication is fuel/oil bleed off the main fuel supply. Complete cleanliness and some attention to the design of the fueling system is required.

Mind you there was a very hard landing of a JS jet earlier this year and the jet battery wasn't even plugged in. Some question about the pilot's brain too.

Mind you I don't have a problem with Solo engines either. I recently spent a couple of days de-bugging a Solo 2625-02i that had failed 8 months before.. Found the problem and fixed it and I now understand that system. It is pretty good IMO.

If we are talking operations at 6000msl, the "turbos" may start at that altitude but are not all that likely to have a significant rate of climb on a hot day. I once test flew a new Discus bT on a hot day and it had trouble at 4000 msl.