cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/1604327
In particular, whatever politicans say, the Republican-controlled House has a rider in the FAA authorization bill which requires airports to continue selling leaded fuel for propeller aircraft forever:
The House version of the bill would require airports that receive federal grants to continue selling the same fuels they sold in 2018 in perpetuity.
While the Democratically-controlled Senate requires a phase-out:
The Senate version would require these airports to continue selling the same fuels they sold in 2022, with a sunset date of 2030 or whenever unleaded fuels are “widely available.”
For context, the FAA approved sale of unleaded fuel for all propeller planes last year, and there are local efforts to ban the sale of leaded fuel in locations where the unleaded fuel is now available
I’d wager that the larger portion of aircraft owned belong to institutions like universities and other sources of flight education as well as companies which own fleets of these things.
Some commercial air travel still occurs using these planes also.
You’d be surprised at the kind of people that own private aircraft, they’re not always the kind of “throw money at my problems” people that’ll just lobby the government (they probably don’t even have the money to do anything), bigger interests would likely focus on switching to a new, proprietary, and expensive fuel as a political issue.
The main issue is that they’re using “safety” as a shield to hide behind actually fixing the problem. Any time someone says something is for “safety” they’re full of shit.
TEL is used in avgas so the engines don’t blow up, it literally is a safety issue.
Where the money comes in is when companies need to ground planes, swap out engines, and move to fuel that hasn’t been around for very long (which was only discovered after a massive R&D campaign).
There’s other ways to increase octane, but the faa hates allowing changes.
Yes but alternatives like mogas may require physical changes to aircraft in order to make planes that can only use avgas compatible with mogas. Mogas is also not strictly a comparable alternative as it also comes with its own downsides.
The thing is, I don’t have any sympathy because they’ve had half a century or more to consider this issue and nobody did anything. If you bought a plane knowing it requires leaded fuel, then it’s your responsibility to fix it or ground it.
Then why not say that instead of pretending to be interested in the nuances of the issue?
There’s no nuances to it. They waited too long, everyone affected should have known that this would happen one day.