Originally Posted by Big Pistons Forever
Jet A powered certified piston GA aircraft is IMO the only viable long term solution.
That's one possibility for the longer term future
BPF. And I think more so for higher horsepower engines than for lower horsepower engines. Another possibility is that unleaded avgas may remove some of the perceived urgency to further develop diesel aero engines. The designs to date have had some marginal success, but they still need to be allot better to compete with gasoline engines. Particularly in the higher horsepower piston engine market, the development costs may not allow diesels to be competitive with gasoline engines from a cost versus performance standpoint for some time to come. Burning Jet fuel would have to become quite allot less expensive than it currently is compared to avgas. And some of the performance versus weight gap would have to be closed before market demand would warrant such an investment on the part of either manufacturers or customers.
Much may depend upon what happens to the price delta between jet and avgas in the future. Your guess is as good as mine! With GA being such a limited market, using jet fuel seems logical from a refining, distribution and economy of scale standpoint. Yet so far, any purported cost and performance advantage that has been achieved doesn't seem to have been significant enough to greatly affect aero engine market demand. With further development, who knows though?
westhawk
P.S: While it seems likely that 100UL will be somewhat more expensive to buy than 100LL, I don't see it being prohibitive. And as a "drop in" replacement for 100LL, things can continue as before. No more worry about how to run higher compression avgas engines on lower octane fuel.