Whoosh! The Turbine Bows In

There is nothing easier than telling a hack from a master powerboat pilot. Watch a man as he sidles his craft up to a dock. If he comes in with a nice grumphing exhaust, reverses with another authoritative grumph and stops alongside soft enough to spare an eggshell, he knows his business. But if he comes in riding the throttles and shift levers and punishing ears with a bellowing exhaust, no matter how neatly he docks he is just a noisy duffer.

Now, however, a new element is appearing in the rate-the-skipper game: the turbine engine. It neither grumphs nor bellows; it whispers. "It's not that there is less vibration and noise," says Peter Ryan, Chris-Craft's top turbine man. "Vibration and noise no longer exist."

Nor did turbines exist for the public until recently. Among the things that make Stavros Niarchos different from you and me is his fleet, which includes a 50-knot, turbine-powered former Royal Navy patrol boat. One had to have Niarchos' kind of money to think about buying a turbine boat of any kind. Now being a man of means is enough, for both Chris-Craft and Pacemaker, after years of testing, are taking orders for turbine-engined yachts with a price tag of approximately $150,000.

Steep though the price still is, the fact that an individual can even consider buying turbine power is good news. Apart from their silence and freedom from vibration, turbine engines are inherently cleaner in terms of exhaust emissions than conventional gas or diesel piston engines. They should be far more reliable than existing engines—capable of running faster longer—and are more compact. The illustration here of Chris-Craft's 45-foot sport-fisherman contrasts a pair of 450-horsepower turbines with the outlines of the two diesel engines they replace. The turbines are marinized versions of a Ford Motor Company truck engine and weigh about 2,000 pounds each. A diesel of equivalent power weighs 500 pounds more.

"It is the fine machining of turbine parts that costs so much," says Ryan, who is Chris-Craft's director of mechanical engineering. "Some bits turn at 35,000 revolutions per minute. Bearings and gears have to be of very high quality to stand the stresses, and oil channels require some tricky forming. But the engine is very forgiving. If something goes wrong you might slow down, but that's all. Nine times out of 10 you will be able to limp home. In 650 hours of running a test boat we had to come back on one engine only once."

The other day Ryan was happily watching a pair of 45-footers—one a turbine, the other a diesel—move down a production line in Pompano Beach, Fla. Both were of fiber glass, teak-trimmed and full of good new-boat smells, identical except for chrome intake grilles on the turbine's cabin trunk below the windows. The turbine boat's controls were like those of any other, right down to the tachometer, throttle and the twist of the ignition key.

Disadvantages? A couple. The turbine burns more fuel than a diesel. And its very silence can be a problem, as Chris-Craft's Craig Muir discovered one day while on a test run. Unable to judge engine speed from the exhaust pitch, as he would routinely on another boat, and neglecting to glance at his tachs, he threw the prototype into reverse, which at his speed was like reversing a car at 50 mph. "If the tachs ever go, you may be in trouble," he said later. Still, all he managed to break was a lag bolt in one engine mount. Just a $150,000 scare.