Suter Industries

Suter Industries AG produces UAV engines that were co-developed with Compass Aviation Engines GmbH (CAE GmbH). Suter’s roots go back to the motorcycle racing era of the 1990s. Eskil Suter was a successful Grand Prix racing driver and founded the Suter Racing company in 1996. The company is known for their “SuterClutch” and other products for the motorcycle racing market including high-performance engines, motorcycles and various components. In 2015, Suter Racing launched a four-cylinder 2-stroke racing motorcycle that was developed and produced in house including the Suter500 2-stroke engine. Since 2002 Suter has applied their expertise gained from the motorcycle racing market to develop products for other markets including automotive, aerospace and defense. The Suter/CAE collaboration and development of UAV engines is one of the new products coming out of Suter Industries.

CAE GmbH is lead by Dietrich Kehe who is a mechanical engineer with over 24 years’ experience in manned and unmanned 2-stroke aircraft engines. He received his engineering degree with a focus on combustion engines from the University of Hochschule für Technik – Esslingen (Stuttgart, Germany area). Dietrich has developed clean sheet engine designs for advanced UAV applications utilizing advanced electronic fuel injection (including direct injection) technology. These include complete propulsion systems with integrated starter-generators, engine mounts and belt/gear reduction drive systems. These solutions are flying on some of the world’s most advanced UAV applications. Dietrich also has an understanding of the supply base required to design/produce advanced 2-stroke engines and teamed with Suter Industries to be the development and production partner to bring a new line of advanced UAV engines to the global market. The first engine to be developed by the Suter/CAE team is the Suter 288 engine which is a twin cylinder, horizontal opposed, air cooled, two cycle engine, with fuel saving electronic engine management system and a 1kW starter/generator. Displacement is 288cm³. Power: 13.3kW (18HP) @5700rpm, 17.5kW (24HP) @6500rpm. All engines are produced in Switzerland and are 100% tested and supplied with a certificate of conformance. The engine has automatic altitude and temperature calibration and runs on gasoline. A heavy fuel variant will be available in the future.