I have said this other places: These canard airplanes are not good designs with which to experiment with engines. They glide shallow and land fast and there are no flaps or good drag devices that you can use to assist in picking your landing spot and approach speed. I have checked guys out in my Cozy and it is the rare person who can set up a decent off-airport landing approach. It is so easy to be fast with no way to slow down. What can happen is that the gear is somewhat fragile; nose gear collapses, canard digs in or catches something and the heavy engine-end of the airplane flips it over. Also, energy dissipation in a crash is related to velocity squared. If you land engine out at 100 vs 80 you would have 56% more energy to dissipate in a crash. You can stall a Cessna in at 50 kts. In my Cozy, a couple seconds of inattention in an engine-out pattern and I'm gliding at 100 kts--300% more energy to dissapate in the break-up of the airplane and my little pink body.
From time to time, I've had various little glitches with my airplane engines and believe me, I am not crazy about flying when there is any doubt about my engine. Let me pose the case where your rotary is flying but you have a few problems to iron out. You are sorting out water-cooling, PRSU, a very hot exhaust and non-standard carburation in an airplane that you hardly know yet. This makes you much more of a test pilot than the guy who has bolted-on a Lycoming. The failure modes of a Lycoming are well-known and can be foreseen with ordinary care. The failure modes on a rotary are more unpredictable.
People say "Well, a rotary will run for many minutes with no water." Heck, I never want to get to that test condition. And unless your rotary performs flawlessly, your wife and friends are not going to want to fly that airplane and you wouldn't ask them to.
Just some food for thought.
I am all for truly new and improved systems, but I do appreciate this advice.
