I am guessing it's still allowed because people who fly planes can afford to lobby.
I was astounded to find TEL was still allowed in aviation fuels. Rates of cancers etc are higher near military bases due to fuel handling incidents.
Avgas is only used in piston engines, and the military mostly flies turbines, which use ordinary jet fuel (which does not contain lead). They have some, but I think if you told the military "jets and turboprops only" it wouldn't be a big problem. (Not sure how they would train new pilots, however.)
If you're looking for disease/damage from lead in avgas, you want to find a little airport in the middle of nowhere that has a really good restaurant on the field ;)
https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas
> I am guessing it's still allowed because people who fly planes can afford to lobby.
People that fly piston engines do not have any money to lobby.
To me it feels very similar to why software engineers pay so much tax -- we get paid just enough to be dinged by things like the AMT, but not enough to afford lobbyists.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/973128/ as an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_SR20
There might be some piston-based helicopters (too many to check), or drones.
Otherwise, yes, bangers are out.
A previous article about Leaded Petrol caused me to read how the UK exempted some very old cars which could not be effectively modified. There's actually a waiver so that, in theory, every fuel station in the country can do paperwork to get a small amount of leaded gasoline (a tiny fraction of their total fuel sales) and sell it for this purpose. The politicians were thus able to tell their constituents we did not screw you, just ask your local supplier to set aside fuel for you.
But economics does the rest, at first those retailers see sales of leaded fuel are very low. Those who love classics maybe decide to set aside the option for a year or two and see how it goes, everybody else stops selling leaded fuel. The wholesalers now see that sales of leaded fuel are tiny, so they don't bother making it, it becomes a special order, which then further increases the pressure not to bother stocking it. Today enthusiasts will just mail order the lead additive and pour it into their tank after a refill or they use a substitute additive which these days works well enough, the politicians didn't have to lift a finger.
> After more than three decades of research and development, general aviation finally has an approved unleaded 100-octane fuel.
https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/gami-awarded-long-awaite...
AvGas (which uses TEL) is used by general aviation exclusively.
But it isn't. Those planes aren't aren't fuelled by AvGas. Their engines use JetA (basically kerosene) because they've got a turbine inside like those turbofan engines which look so visibly different, however their turbine powers the propeller rather than a set of fans to drive more air through the engine and produce thrust that way.
The categories (for non-military use) are generally Scheduled or Air Transport (any time you buy tickets for a flight, that's the category, you don't know or care who is flying, you paid for the journey between a specific origin and destination at a specific time; a FedEx plane is also Transport), then Commercial (not Transport but somebody is getting paid to fly aircraft, maybe it's crop spraying, TV news copter, police, or just another TV priest being flown around in his private jet), and only if nobody was getting paid is it General Aviation.
If your cosmetic dentist can afford a brand new Vision Jet so that he can live 100 miles away and fly in to do $5000 appointments without sitting in traffic, that's General Aviation. The authorities don't care that he's getting paid to be a dentist, he's not getting paid to fly his plane.
If your airline uses a relatively tiny PA-42 to get customers to an obscure but important airstrip with maybe 3-4 passengers per day that's still Air Transport.
On the other hand if some oil sheik owns their own A320 with their own custom decor and has a team of pilots to fly it wherever they want, that's still only Commercial, not Air Transport because nobody is buying tickets, it just goes wherever he wants.
Don’t confuse the commercial certificate[“license”](which is required to be paid for flying) with commercial operations (typically holding out to the public for air transport).
And by people who don't want to ever have to clean or rebuild a carburetor in their small motors. It's been an exceptional motor-life-extender to my chainsaws specifically.
which is the one used for commercial aviation.
Then there is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about, the military which is using the 'JP-X' variants all over the world,
some of them even for their cars and trucks, because, hey, it's just better Diesel, why would we stock different fuels if we don't have to?
What a logistic nightmare!1!!
It's just something I won't do.
If not, it could be some lower octane unleaded formulation. There are a couple of standards for these, but they have never caught on.
There’s been a lot of interest in it, especially in light of the recent discussions to close RHV in San Jose. I know one of the flight schools here just switched all their aircraft over to UL94.
Higher performance aircraft will need UL100, which is still not available, but is expected soon. There’s been significant progress in getting it approved over the last year.
Swift Fuels sells the supplemental type certificate aircraft owners need to use UL94. They are offering a free upgrade to the UL100 STC once it’s offered, so aircraft owners don’t have to pay twice to start using UL94 today.
The standard story seems to be that 20% of the planes burn 80% of the fuel, and need all the octane in 100LL. And GA is such a small market that airfields can't justify having multiple fuel grades available, so 100LL everywhere it is.
But yes, nice to hear that UL94 is nonetheless available in some places.
We fill our cars every week and when you stand there thinking "damn I love this smell" yet when there's 1ppm of benzene in sun cream people scream "caaaancer"...
Comprehensive government regulation would create such an infrastructure. When the government says "in 5 years we will disallow creation of new airframes that use leaded gas, and in 10 years there will be no more leaded gas sold, and in 15 years additives will be illegal", everyone knows what's on the horizon - and you can bet that there will be engine vendors selling modification kits and maintenance infrastructure, since now everyone knows that there will be a massive market coming up as everyone has to adapt to the new rules if they want to keep flying!
Or, it would destroy small engine general aviation.
> and you can bet that there will be engine vendors selling modification kits and maintenance infrastructure, since now everyone knows that there will be a massive market coming up as everyone has to adapt to the new rules if they want to keep flying!
What if, you know, people can't adapt? What if people can't afford to replace their 40 years old aircrafts with sparkling new ones, costing 5-10 times much? Sure, some of them will, but there are many hobbyists who can afford loan payments and insurance on a plane worth $100k, but couldn't do the same on one worth $500k.
Yes, this would stop emissions of TEL, sure, but at tremendous cost. Is that cost worth it? To our (and FAA, and EPA) best knowledge, probably not, as lead emissions from GA have much different characteristic than the ones from cars.