AVGAS - US attack?
 

It seems that Friends of the Earth have filed legal action in the US District Court of Columbia attempting to require the Environmental Protection Agency to take action to regulate lead from GA aircraft.

http://www.mlstrategies.com/articles...-12.pdf#page=6

When you think there's an awful lot of big piston engines flying around in the States, especially Alaska, that can't use unleaded, and really DO need avgas, I really can't see how this is gonna be easy..

Bleedin lefties, they'll spoil all the fun for everyone!:=






PS Are they called 'Friends of the Earth' cos they havent got any human friends?:E

:ok:

Anyway, where are the French when you really need them?

Perhaps they would be willing to pay for conversion of all piston aircraft to turboprops. I'd support that :)

If you take a look at the Lyk website there is quite a good item on the legal position and the expectation that 100LL will be dead in the US by 2020, this was pre this legal development. In the US there is a big debate on a one two or three fuel solution. In the UK we currently have a three fuel situation already, Mogas, Avgas 91UL and Avgas 100LL.

Rod1

Since almost nobody stocks the first two....

Thats because ASDA stock the first one at 1.36 a litre ans every jodel I know of runs perfectly well on it.

Ah, yes the fuel of the bacon butty run for those with a limited imagination. Not much use in the high speed IFR tourers used to actually going somewhere......

**** speaking as a turbine pilot with no fuel issues.

Went to a seminar many moons ago and if I remember correctly Shell said that the amount of lead emitted into the atmosphere world wide per year from Aviation was about 4 tonnes, that is a lump about the size of a coffee table.. Not exactly a lot is it.
One problem they had was if they couldn't get the specific rating out of a batch of fuel, previously they would of blended it to produce car fuel, with the leaded version of that gone, they now had to pay a company to take it away, burn it and filter the emissions.

... or dyed it red, and called it 80/87

I, like many on here operate an all lycoming fleet, so it's interesting to see their take on it:

Unleaded Fuels: Avgas by any other name... is Avgas - Lycoming

They seem to be looking for a good alternative to Avgas. This attack is one of many, and ultimately it looks like 100LL will be dead and buried within the next 10-20 years as soon as an unleaded alternative has been found.

As has been mentioned in previous threads, the problem is when you take the lead out you end up with 91UL, which is no good for high performance singles, but fine for your typical spam can burger run or training fleet. It seems from their bulletins that Lycoming are trying to find an alternative, but the reality is that it's a reasonably specialist market, so where is the financial incentive?

From their website it looks like Lycoming would like to see a one fuel soloution, since that would make production costs more reasonable. A two or three fuel soloution would likely see the high performance aircraft paying an awful lot more for their high octane fuel, since the bulk of the market will happily run on the lower octane.

I don't think it is as simple.

GA developments are led from the USA and they are looking for a single fuel which is good for the whole 100LL fleet. They need that, because they have lots of people who fly distances in high perf planes.

They also have loads of bimblers but that's OK.

In the UK, you have a sub-community (very active on the forums) which can run on car petrol and they have small tanks which can be practically filled from jerrycans filled up at petrol stations. That community will continue doing what it is doing now. They don't fly to the bigger airports anyway because they won't pay more than £5 landing fee.

The "jerrycan" solution is utterly impractical for larger private aircraft. To fill mine up I would need a trailer full of heavy jerrycans, plus a bodybuilder to lift them. And no garage will let me fill up that many anyway. And mine is just a 1400kg MTOW 4-seater.

The oil companies would much rather sell a single fuel, and I suspect they are also waiting for whatever comes out of the USA.

France is a different case again. There is almost no French-pilot touring there; they have an almost wholly club based scene where people fly short distances from one club to another. They can burn something lower than 100LL in the Robins etc. But the airports there have the same dilemna as elsewhere unless they want to exclude foreign visitors, most of whom need 100LL because they are flying the more capable planes.

In my opinion, a clear and impending removal of AVGAS 100LL at, say, 18 months notice, would be a very good thing for GA.

Microlighting went through something similar when 4-star was withdrawn; everybody knuckled down, the various organisations worked together, and by the time we no longer had 4-star, everybody had the necessary permissions to run on EN228 unleaded. Which they still do.

Whilst I'm not much of a fuel expert, I'm quite certain that all of the problems of running light aircraft on unleaded fuel can be solved and if we were forced to, we'd solve them. It might also end the dominance of some of the mainstay 1960s era training aeroplanes, but I can't honestly see that as a bad thing.

In the meantime, if we all start paying MOGAS prices, if you take fuel as around 2/3 of the cost of flying a light aeroplane, and MOGAS as 2/3 of the cost of AVGAS, you'll shave around 15-20% off the cost of GA flying.

That would, despite a lot of fuss in the short term, be a really good thing.

G

If I understand correctly, the aeroplane doesn't have to be very high performance to be incompatible with UL91. I would be delighted to be proved wrong but as far as I can tell the PA28-161 that I fly from a club may not use UL91.

Yes it would be nice if club rental aircraft were not generally so old and horrible (although I was lucky to find a club that has aircraft which are old but very tidy and well equipped, it can be done) but where in the new generation stuff are four seats and approval to fly night and IMC? (Genuine question, I don't know the new aircraft market).

Also of course is it any surprise that clubs and schools run knackered old kit when people whinge about a tenner to land and post questions along the lines of "Where is the cheapest place to learn to fly" rather than "Where is the most suitable place to learn to fly" or similar.

The industry's been dicking around with a 100LL replacement for decades. (greatly simplified statement :))

Couldn't they just move to UL94 (UL91/96) and be done with it?

Fine in theory but don't you think that Mogas would creep up to the price of Avgas? Due no doubt to 'difficulty with supply and production blah blah' :yuk:

Look how Diesel has shot up in price over the last twenty years or so. For no reason whatsoever other than demand.

The problem is that most of the GA flight can't move to Mogas or the UL91/96 because the engines won't run on it and there are no alternative engines for them.

My Cessna will not run on low Octane fuel and neither will something like Peters TB20.

So ending Avgas will effectively ground most of the GA fleet and thus end GA. Now the Microlight and Permit boys may just sit there all smug that they can carry on as they have no problems. But with most of the GA fleet gone the world will become a whole lot smaller and without the big GA targets in the way to run interference, how long do you think it will take those with idle hands to target you? Someone has to feed the CAA machine........

At about 1g lead/litre for 100LL, that's only 4 million litres of fuel - 1 million gallons or thereabouts. According to Wikipedia, "The annual U.S. usage of avgas was 186 million US gallons in 2008". I doubt that leaded avgas is the most pressing environmental concern out there, but I think your figures are out.

How much avgas do the military use in drones and trainers? Would it be plausible to wager that it will only be available whilst they still require it?

Great to have you on our side :ugh:

It would take out all mission capability / utility value out of GA.

It would shrink GA to farm strips, mostly. I know a lot of UK GA would be happy, on the basis of "I am allright Jack".

A proper solution needs to be found.

My engine (IO540-C4) can probably run on 96 octane just fine; it's one of the marginal cases. But most of the more capable ones can't and the airframes would be scrapped.

"How much avgas do the military use in drones and trainers?"

I imagine that you are right about piston engine basic trainers using Avgas (the Air Cadet Grob 109s which share our airfield certainly do) but I would guess that piston powered drones might be on jet fuel / Diesel. Back in the mid 1990s I was slightly involved in a project to develop a 100 cc capacity Diesel powered piston engine because the US military wanted a human portable electrical generator but also wanted no gasoline on the battlefield.