That's a tough one, Anthony. There was not much discussion on speed limiters at the convention. I guess the people with the trouble were not at the meetings (hint). I have often defended speed limiters, as my position was if that is what we needed to keep 2.5M insurance for 58 bucks a year, then I am all for it. If we can get rid of them, I am all for that too. BTW, I voted yesterday for the regs that remove the speed limiter requirement, as did Bob Wilcox.

It is my understanding that the original proposal pulled speed limiters off of the table for technical reasons. It was made clear to me yesterday, that there has always been an understanding that at least one vendor has a decent, acceptable speed limiter on the market. The presentations to the EC were that there were no viable third party limiters available. That made me feel better, as I have not heard that from others. A lot of confusion here as you can see.

I only recently found out how simple the current third party speed limiter design really is. Let me confirm that in my opinion, from an engineering perspective, this currently available limiter cannot work well enough for general acceptance. So IMHO, if the AMA mandates speed limiters, they will need to have enough of a grace period for someone to come up with something, either a new third party limiter, or give the manufacturers time to make new ECUs.

In the past when I have said that, in my engineering judgment, a third party speed limiter could be made. I meant a unit that is technically far beyond the current unit. The limiter I am talking about would in some ways be almost as complex as the current ECUs are. Even with this complexity, in many ways it could never be as good as the current ECU integrated speed limiters (as are on the JetCat, and my understanding also on the BMT). But it still might be good enough.

So, in my opinion, if speed limiters were mandated, the best technical approach would be to add them to the various ECUs. The next best approach would be the development of a standard 3rd party speed limiter, that is then tightly coupled to each different ECU, with such data as the RPM and maybe even EGT brought out to the speed limiter. This would almost certainly need to be done with the cooperation of the ECU manufacturer, and might or might not be an upgrade to current ECUs. With the realities of the very small addressable market, the cost would be pretty high for such a unit. Maybe someone will come up with the ultimate ECU that everyone can adopt, I don't know.

I believe this is why many are trying to get away from a mandated speed limiter, because of the turmoil it would throw a lot of turbine manufacturers and customers (AMA members) into.