A turbocharger is a big, heavy, clunky iron casting strapped onto the side of your engine. They are added to aircraft engines because the atmosphere thins with altitude. We lean normally-aspirated engines as we climb to avoid too much fuel going into the cylinder, in effect “flooding” the engine. A turbocharger reverses this process: instead of taking away fuel, it adds more air into the combustion chamber, sustaining the necessary 17:1 air-to-fuel ratio despite the thinning atmosphere. This quick report explains how this clever technology works.
