BMW 802

The BMW 802 was a large air-cooled radial aircraft engine, built using two rows of nine cylinders to produce what was essentially an 18-cylinder version of the 14-cylinder BMW 801. Although promising at first, development dragged on and the project was eventually cancelled to concentrate on jet engines instead.

Design and development

Soon after the 801 entered testing, BMW engineers turned to building much larger versions.

BMW 803

One idea was to bolt two 801s back to back. Although seemingly a simple concept, the resulting, 83.5 litre displacement BMW 803 was fantastically complicated. The power of the engine could only practically be used in extremely large propellers, or, as selected, a contra-rotating pair of propellers. This required a large gearbox on the front of the engine, which combined with the layout of the cylinders, left no room for airflow over the cylinders. This demanded the addition of liquid cooling.

Another idea was to add more cylinders to the 801 design, and since radials need to have an odd number of cylinders per row, the next size up was a two-row 9-cylinder design. The 802 emerged with an almost identical displacement to the American 18-cylinder Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone and just larger than the British Bristol Centaurus.

One problem with the 801 was its poor altitude performance, due almost entirely to its single-stage two-speed, mechanically driven supercharger. Since the 802 was not a necessity given the success and emerging flexibility of the 801's basic design, the engineers decided to take the time needed to address this problem by including an improved two-stage, three-speed supercharger. The lowest-speed setting would not "rob" as much power at low altitudes, allowing the engine to produce 2,600 PS (1,912 kW) for takeoff, and still produce 1,600 PS (1,176 kW) at . This was a dramatic improvement on the 801A's 1,600 PS (1,176 kW) for takeoff and 1,380 PS (1,015 kW) maximum at , especially notable considering the engine was less than 30% larger in displacement.

In addition, airflow through the engine had been carefully managed by the BMW aviation powerplant engineering team to enable the straightest possible path into and out of the engine. A twelve-blade fan, almost identical in appearance to the 801's, and stator compressed incoming air, then fed some into the supercharger. The rest was channeled into three paths, the intercooler and the front and rear cylinder baffles. All three streams rejoined behind the rearmost row of cylinders into the exhaust.

Looking at competing German engines in the 2,000 hp 'class', the engine weighed , and considered it "one of the most interesting piston engines seen in Germany".