The history of the elimination of leaded gasoline
blogs.loc.gov
blogs.loc.gov
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30943466
https://www.avweb.com/insider/faa-do-your-damn-job/
Can your Congressional rep and the FAA and ask why this isn't done yet.
I have young kids. We live near Hanscom Field and spend a lot of time near Barnstable Airport. Should we try writing our local airports/cities/counties?
At Barnstable Airport, the big operator is Cape Air. They make a big show of being green, so maybe they'd want to be early adopters of G100UL. Does anyone know if the existing G100UL STC applies to Cape Air's fleet? Could they switch to it if they wanted to?
https://download.aopa.org/advocacy/2021/SE01966WI_AML-Amd1.p...
https://gami.com/g100ul/GAMI_Q_and_A.pdf
Adding to the data above some of my personal opinion, which was informed by visiting GAMI's Ada, OK facility, taking the APS course (taught by the GAMI principal engineer), and having seen the fuel demonstrated on the higher-strung TIO-540 Navajo engine: that the 402C's engines would run just fine on G100UL without operational limitations, but as above they cannot legally do that today.
I'm glad you think that G100UL should work in the Cessna engines and it's "just" a bureaucratic issue. Do you have any sense of what the current blocker to approval is? I found Paul Bertorelli's AVweb article a bit hard to follow.
I'm not saying that to be cagey; I just haven't spent tons of time thinking about all of the "what could go wrong?" and "why is airplane certification done the way it's done?" It's easy to sit on the outside and say "that's ridiculously overly conservative!" but I suspect the truth is there is a mix of over-conservative and genuine purpose to "until you prove it via certification, it's not certified as true".
Air-cooled engines have wildly varying operating conditions. Airplanes need to take off not just on a 60ºF sea-level departure to a 3000' cruise, but also at a 105ºF departure from 5000' with a direct climb over terrain to 15K feet. The fuel will sometimes be 125ºF after baking in a tank or a wing all day. It might not be on the exact centerline of the specification range. It might be 6 months old and some of the higher volatility compounds present in reduced amounts. High-strung turbo engines with fixed timing live with pretty low detonation margins, especially at partial mixture settings. Pilots rely on the pilot-operating-handbook or airplane-flight-manual for performance calculations with regards to runway utilization, accelerate-stop/accelerate-go distances, all engine climb gradient and one-engine-INOP climb gradient. Any amount of performance degradation that would invalidate those figures is cause for FAA rejection of the STC. Having flown a handful of heavy, hot, and high departures where the ground isn't falling away from the airplane nearly as quickly as I'd like, I can appreciate a certain amount of conservatism here.
So, I have to give the FAA some benefit of the doubt as I'm not an expert on certification topics. I do believe in the technical ability and already completed lab, bench, and flight testing that GAMI has done and the way they've set out to approach the problem, but to be fair and balanced, they've done some amount of "we think the FAA/PAFI process is fundamentally the wrong approach and we're going to go about it this other way that we think is superior." I happen to think they're right, but when you very publicly do that to a government agency who said they want the process to work this other way and you don't participate in their preferred process, I think it's reasonable to expect that you'll run into delays. (Even if no FAA person is acting in the least bit unethically; you're just trying to use a different process than the one they're putting their energy into and even if everyone has the best intentions, that will cause friction and slowdowns.)
Lots and lots and lots of rules, especially post 1970 or so are about ass-covering. Post 1980 you get a lot of rules designed to remove human judgement from the equation.
https://www.avweb.com/insider/faa-do-your-damn-job/
> To scrub the playhead forward, last summer at Oshkosh, to great fanfare, the STC approving G100UL was announced. It applied to a limited number of engines and GAMI was tasked with additional testing and data work to expand the engine list. This it did. The Wichita Aircraft Certification Office duly sent a letter to FAA HQ reporting that GAMI met all the test requirements—best-run program they had ever seen, or words to that effect—and was entitled to an STC-AML with every single spark ignition engine in the FAA database approved to use G100UL.
...
> At a press conference, Lawrence said he thought PAFI had been “a great success.” I simply cannot agree. I don’t know how anyone in the industry could think this. PAFI was supposed to yield an unleaded drop-in replacement for 100LL. It did not. It was an abject failure and now, even though the FAA has an STC in hand awaiting approval for a fuel that has been proven, ad nauseum, to work in all engines, it wants more money for more testing. While the PAFI program—that was Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative—supposedly produced data, accessing it is all but impossible.
I think applying local pressure (I.e. the Santa Clara approach) will only annoy pilots and get their political associations (AOPA, EAA, etc.) to dig in and fight bans and closures. In general, pilots of small planes desperately want to switch away from leaded gasoline too! We all want the same thing. I have a family that I don’t want lead poisoned, too. But I’m not going to simply stop flying airplanes indefinitely waiting for the FAA to get its shit together.
Trying to get 100LL banned is like those protestors blocking rush hour traffic to advocate for their cause—it is unlikely to be effective, and it more likely just makes any potential allies into enemies.
Maybe local pressure would be more appropriate once the FAA approves G100UL for all engines. Then it could be about encouraging airports to make sure G100UL is actually available, and getting airlines like Cape Air to switch over their fleets.
Holy shit. This is a "the FDA should be coming down on this hard yesterday" kind of thing.
If you have to fly certain small planes, there is no legal alternative in most places.
Although on this specific topic, I almost wonder if you could make a case that the unleaded avgas is safer not for public health, but for the private pilot and therefore the public in terms of the FAA's main understanding of safety (IE don't let planes crash). How much is a pilot's reasoning capacity compromised by chronic lead poisoning due to the necessary handling of avgas and breathing in fumes that they must do in operation of their plane?
Very few of these high compression, high HP planes are flown by people just "flying our own plane". Most of us fly small planes that can easily burn unleaded.
The rest don't sound like particularly good reasons to keep showering people with lead.
2. It only applies to low compression engines, which is a lot of engines, but which also rules out most airplanes made since the 70s. There's a few exceptions, but not significant in terms of manufactured numbers to matter. (the STC you're likely talking about is the one that let engines run on 80 octane)
If the MoGas STC mattered then pilots would have adopted it because rec fuel (ethanol free gasoline) is significantly cheaper than AvGas
#2 and the low availability of mogas at airports is the reason for a lack of adoption fleet wide.
That's the premise/promise of G100UL: it can serve all the spark-ignition piston aircraft.
If there were an unleaded 100-ish octane fuel legally available as a substitute, that would have demand if 100LL were banned. Over 70% of the avgas burned is burned in airplanes that are not eligible for the STC* to allow them to burn mogas (typically as a result of having lower worst-case detonation margins as a result of being turbo-charged, super-charged, high-compression, or some combination).
* - Supplemental Type Certificate - an airplane modification, in this case a mostly [entirely for most airframes] paperwork modification, to their original type certificate.
Yes exposure isn't zero and effects from that exposure aren't zero, but let's get a good idea of how big the effect size is, because it really seems like some people have an out-of-proportion idea of what the risk actually is.
I'm much more concerned about the heavy metal exposure from nearby coal plants than I am by general aviation fuel.
[0] https://news.sccgov.org/news-release/study-commissioned-coun...
Incidentally I recall a later episode mentioning that a couple of decades ago someone was able to get an unleaded fuel approved for aviation in, iirc, Sweden. Unsure why that didn't get much traction.
"The presence of this fuel means the areas near these airports are often inundated with tiny lead particles"
I agree that we should find lead free alternatives (some exist, so it sounds like this is purely bureaucracy). There's really no reason to keep using it.
That said, it seems there is some fear mongering going on in this article. If the air is truly inundated, why is it that only 2.5% of the kids have a detectable level? If it's in the air and everywhere, then it should be detectable in vastly more children in that area. The biggest question in my mind is, why is this area so low when 50% of US children have detectable lead levels?
We knew lead from petrol was poisoning everything -- deformed babies, ruined ecosystems etc. and yet the price incentive ensured it would never be dropped as a consumer product -- people kept buying leaded petrol as the cost would always be externalized somewhere else. The government had to step in and and ban the practice. Why didn't the free market solve this particular problem?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson looked at Clare Patterson's work (the whistleblower of leaded petrol being harmful) in an episode of Cosmos. Highly recommend it -- very interesting episode.
The Free Market doesn't care about externalities. Whichever solution produces the desired results for the lowest amount of money wins. If it happens to destroy the environment in the process the market has no idea because the environment isn't on the market. This is the reason regulation exists, and why sometimes regulation causes companies to go out of business, because the regulation can't be applied globally and if there is somewhere else in the world where the environment can be destroyed to produce the product more cheaply then that is what will happen. It is a tragedy that we apply environmental regulation locally when the environment is a shared global resource.
The point is that no, you cannot live in a utopia and have an unregulated market. The market will greed itself into non-existence.
Lead gas would eventually reach the point of doing so much damage that people wouldn't want to use it anymore, even if it was cheaper. Even if it didn't get to this point, eventually it would be killing/debilitating so many people that it phases itself out.
For that to be the case:
(a) you'd have to be able to make the causal link between societal damage and lead from vehicle fuel, which isn't something most people are capable of doing as individuals
(b) you'd have to have a choice in the matter as an individual consumer, which you didn't have for cars, because automakers produced engines that (they said) required lead gasoline, and the situation is similar for AV fuel
This is why pure market solutions don't work. But at the same time markets are by far the most efficient way to distribute limited resources so you want to use them as much as you can. You just have to remember that they are no good for solving problems you can't put a price on and you may have to artificially weight the market to account for side effects.
I'm saying that there is no invisible effect, just so small it can't (initially) be detected. But it is inherently additive, and one day (days, years, centuries, millennia) the market will correct for it.
Lead pollution in the air damages people's property. The owners of that property can then sue the lead emitters for damages.
This has practical problems when the externality is very small for each emitter and each damaged party, but that's the principle.
Typically modern regulations kills this recourse, since if you've followed the regulations, you can't be sued for it. Then the emitters sooner or later capture the regulator, and things go bad anyway.
Option 2: Just pass a law to ban it.
> Then the emitters sooner or later capture the regulator, and things go bad anyway.
I’m unaware of any evidence that this is the case for leaded gasoline.
Sometimes the market just isn’t magic.
Solutions that work in practice >> solutions that work in theory.
Rather difficult to demonstrate any harm to an individual, no? In a case, the damage from lead would be a hypothetical: my child would have had a higher IQ if she weren't exposed to lead, and that exposure is due to its use as a motor fuel.
CO₂ emissions is the extreme case of this difficulty. Almost everyone contributes a tiny part to the problem, and almost everyone is also a potential victim of it.
Because of that, I'm not categorically opposed to regulation handling these difficult situations. But I also note that airplane fuel IS regulated, and that has NOT solved the problem!
The best solution to CO₂ emissions is some form of carbon tax, but that has proven politically impossible in most jurisdictions.
I don't deny there are many unrealistic dreamers on "my" side. But that's endemic across all ideological sides.
Even if there are one or two cases, that's hardly a "long track record" compared to the inability of private citizens to sue to enact meaningful change in climate change, asbestos, leaded gas, fracking, polluted oceans, acid rain, deforestation, lead in the water, chemicals in our food supply, etc etc etc.
The basic market reason ethanol wasn't used originally is that it was produced by farmers not by oil distillers, so this meant taking profits away from the oil sector and giving them to the agricultural sector. There's some evidence that one reason the JD Rockefeller pushed Prohibition in the USA was to lock farmers out of the automobile fuel business. Since 2003 in California at least, ethanol is the major fuel additive that's replaced TEL and MTBE.
Markets are not free in the energy sector, they're highly controlled and monopolized, and basically always have been. This is why many counties have chosen to essentially nationalize their energy production and distribution systems. All other market activity relies on a stable energy supply, it's similar to water in that respect.
A gallon of gas weighs around 3.8kg. TEL concentrations for most of the period of auto use were 2-3g/gal (so under 0.1% by mass).
The current spec of 100LL avgas has a maximum of 2.12g/gal (~0.056%)
Why people would think these things don't need regulation is a better question.
Upton Sinclair's the Jungle is one famous example:
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-24-1-b...
> Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were processed, doctored by chemicals, and mislabeled for sale to the public. He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around. He explained how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as "potted chicken."
> Sinclair wrote that meat for canning and sausage was piled on the floor before workers carried it off in carts holding sawdust, human spit and urine, rat dung, rat poison, and even dead rats. His most famous description of a meat-packing horror concerned men who fell into steaming lard vats:
> . . . and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, --sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!
It's the regulatory body, the FAA that makes it illegal to use G100UL for most aircraft.
Actually, the more you think about it many of very profitable companies do profit by externalizing the costs. That's also why they put so much money into lobbying: So no one will change the system.
Because consumers don't give a shit. As long as they can still go to Walmart and buy their feed, they don't care.
Information asymmetry & greed. And consumers who would fail the marshmallow test.
Anyway these things and more are part of "the market" too. If a market framework can't find effective solutions in the presence of real people with human faults and weaknesses, then what value is it to us?
Same pattern appears for other externalized environmental costs. Dump it in the poor neighborhood/city/state/country.
I think it is weird that people are still all for Laissez-Faire economics, considering we've tried it several times in history and it has always failed miserably (in before the ~~communists~~ say "but that wasn't _real_ Laissez-Faire). We literally saw it lead to quazi governments (meaning it literally destroys itself). I do believe capitalism has a lot of advantages, but no system is perfect. There probably is no global optima for the solution space. Worse, the solution space is dynamic! Good news is that we do know that multi-agent reinforcement games are pretty good at finding local optima (though they can often get trapped in local optima that we don't want). I think if you understand this it is clear that we need a body that can react to the dynamic nature of both the environment and desires (of the people) that can continually optimize and update the rules. I do think there's debate of how to do this, but I think it is very clear that too heavy of a hand isn't good and neither is too light of a hand. A pure competitive system can't account for externalizes or better yet, tragedy of the commons. As our world becomes even more complex and interconnected, and as we understand more about our environment and consequences of our actions, it is imperative that we think about these issues in a far more nuanced way and avoid thinking there are "correct" answers (as opposed to "good enough").
What (categories of) problem(s) do folks generally think markets solve?
Who was protecting them, and how?
"Researchers found that estimated lead-linked deficits were greatest for people born between 1966 and 1970, a population of about 20.8 million people, which experienced an average deficit of 5.9 IQ points per person."
https://news.fsu.edu/news/health-medicine/2022/03/08/fsu-res....
My recollection is this was the end of this guy's government career but he won some kind of award (a la Nobel Prize levels of money from somewhere) that let him pay cash for a house while working as a professor -- or something like that. I tried to do a search and came up with this article that fits with that recollection but doesn't exactly verify the details I remember and I have no idea how to track down the guy's name, etc etc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1984/04/01/c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
This has never occurred to me but that seems obvious. I wonder if it's just not something on lawmaker's radar.
We know that all tool makers will scream and say "how can we be sure 3rd party batteries won't explode in our tools?" I wonder if there could be some sort of certification for both batteries and tools that would mitigate such an issue.
Hopefully the response to that would just be laughter.
IIRC, many of the proprietary batteries used in power tools today use commodity cells internally, either 18650s or 20650s. Not many (any?) are developing their own proprietary cells. Their secret sauce is the plastic shell and connector shape.
What we need, IMO, is standardized sizes and quick-connectors for batteries that are about 10-20x the capacity of an 18650. Big enough for the kind of power a tool needs, small enough that there's not much excuse for a hand tool or lawn mower not to fit them.
And load leveling, over/under current protection, metering UI, etc etc. Also, not all 18650s have the same characteristics for dis|charge rates, and capacity.
> Also, not all 18650s have the same characteristics for dis|charge rates, and capacity.
This is true, but I have one charger that handles them all. Not just 18650s, either, but bigger batteries and smaller ones too. It is a solved problem, and not something that a power tool manufacturer needs to try to solve again.
It appears to kinda be. I've got the following equipment from Lowe's (U.S. home improvement store) Kobalt brand:
1. Mower
2. Weed trimmer
3. Electric snow shovel
...all of which take the same battery. But the same battery from Lowe's that (as others point out) probably has a 90% margin. And I think it is a fair question on the part of the manufacturers to ask, "how do we know those other batteries aren't going to go 'pop'?" The standard would have to be segmented as well. I don't to drag around a drill that is using the same battery as the lawn mower; my forearms aren't in that good shape.
All of that said, it is nice to just pull a battery off the lawn equipment charger and not worry about which battery goes where.
It's very effective. Almost 100% of my cordless power tools are DeWalt, for exactly that reason. E.g. I'm in the market now for a cordless air compressor, and it turns out that DeWalt makes one that takes the 20V batteries just like the other tools I carry. Of course it's first on the list.
As it is if you care you can get adapters on eBay/Amazon for cheap.
In my experience, that's usually from one proprietary format to another (e.g. I have an adapter to use older "18V" DeWalt batteries in newer "20V" tools. But I haven't had much luck finding an adapter that would let me use 18650s in my cordless drills.
Moved houses and got a bigger lawn. Got an electric riding mower - a big one - to make sure it could handle the lawn in 1 go. It was expensive, but again zero maintenance, no gas, oil etc, always charged and ready to go.
I have been impressed so far. Next up electric car.
Got solar panels to charge my electric devices. I'm aiming for the long game - hoping it'll pay off in the long run both in cost and environmental.
Why not hire a mowing service? Also expensive, but it puts more velocity into the local economy, is much more efficient (all that lithium and plastic to be used for an hour once a week?), and frees up your valuable time.
Both of these have up front costs, but in the long run I think they are worth it.
Everyone here should send an email to the address at the bottom of "FAA, do your damn job" and to one of the writers of John Oliver. That may get people to apply the right pressure for a change.
Now by Twitter and Facebook, instead.
The winner is visible from a mile away, but the takeaway for me is that using the wrong tool for the job is stupid, not that Twitter itself makes you dumb.