FAA Continues to Stall on G100UL
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"But the applicant, in this case GAMI, should have a right to know who is on the TAB and what their credentials are."
Hmm. Seems like 737 MAX was about the incestuous relationship between the FAA and Boeing, at least in part. Perhaps when there is less knowledge available about the people responsible for approving things we stand a chance of a meaningful result.
They need to figure it out eventually here, not like they haven't had time.
Yes. It's not the _worst_ thing we're doing to the general populace, by probably a decent margin, but it's not good.
Lead bioaccumulates and causes irreversible damage.
The bioaccumulative effects are well researched in all the places you’d expect to undertake expensive and generational health research.
The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History - by Veritasium
That being said I would one day like to get my pilots license and mess around a bit with flying - so common people - lets get this show on the road! ....or air?
The fact remains that unless piston planes can run on ACTUAL car gas (which means gasohol) in the foreseeable future, GA is probably doomed. Or we can stop putting methanol in gas... which is also an excellent idea.
And why would GA be doomed if it can't run on automotive gas? It hasn't _been_ running on automotive gas.
That's like asking why the gas-fired-appliance industry is doomed if natural gas is outlawed. Piston GA has been running on leaded gas, and the unleaded aviation gas that exists is only certified for something like 35% of the piston fleet.
But that's not the only major problem. GA suffers from a shrinking pilot population, with cost being a huge hurdle for both training and operation of planes. Replacing one niche fuel with another isn't going to help.
The industry should've tackled this issue decades ago. The writing was on the wall for leaded gas in the '70s. Yes, it is a technical challenge, but after this much time I find it hard to believe it wouldn't have been solved with enough motivation and a regulatory regime that fostered a solution.
What should we presume these are red herrings? Lead and noise aren't problems? Another commenter posted research indicating that the lead is a real problem.
Also, what airports have been shut down?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigs_Field - closed for 'safety'.
The concern among General Aviation is that there's nobody making new airports. Each loss is something that's almost certainly never coming back.
RHV is under a federal funding agreement and cannot be closed without FAA agreement for most of the next decade.
The "safety" hysteria is easily debunked when you compare aviation accidents near a given airport with the automotive accidents on ONE major street nearby. Santa Monica is another example here, with not one neighbor of the airport killed by a plane crash in a century... while car crashes on the street adjacent to the airport kill (on average) a person every year. Yet this airport will likely be shut down and destroyed after an illegal (Brown Act-violating) back-room deal was struck between an outgoing FAA administrator and the SM city council.
Another favorite lying tactic is to cite, for example, "11 crashes in the last 12 years at such-and-such and airport," but when you look at the accidents you find that they were nowhere near the airport; they're falsely cited because the plane LEFT from that airport or was headed there. That's like shutting down O'Hare because a plane from there crashed in Iowa.
And as noted, iconic Meigs Field, which sat on an island posing zero threat or even annoyance to anyone in Chicago, was destroyed at 3 a.m. by Mayor Daley. This asshole had city fire trucks aim their spotlights at the webcam on the field to hide what he was doing. And what was he doing? Stealing an irreplaceable resource from taxpayers because downstate IL politicians used it... and he didn't like them. But his excuse to the public (three years after 9/11) was that he'd heard that people were worried about a small plane crashing into a building.
This is the kind of corrupt trash arrayed against our thousands of public-use airports across the country, just when aviation advancements have picked up speed and the light-aircraft industry has attracted large amounts of investment and attention. Not to mention the rest of the trash: local politicians taking payoffs from developers and pandering to land speculators.
Nobody wants lead. But lead is going away. We didn't dismantle the interstate highway system to get rid of it from cars, so we sure as hell shouldn't dismantle our national aviation system to get rid of it from planes.
I think when you refer to disgreement as 'hysteria', it's very ironic and not really a serious discussion anymore.
And there's this interesting news: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/06/11/study-finds-no-elevat...
I used to fly 172s and I worried about inhaling the lead fumes and getting sprayed with it during the fuel drain checks. Lead exposure is cumulative and can lead to serious neurological problems later in life. And I've already had a fair share with my electronics hobby (soldering)
Any leaks in unventilated space create risk of fuel-air explosion. Moreover, even comparatively "low" pressure systems where propane/lpg is used in gas form have pressure considerably higher than atmospheric and from the point of dangers and maintenance issues are a high pressure system just waiting to create a nice FAE lightshow. High efficiency liquid injection systems would be even funnier (FSVO).
With the default state of propane being gas, and 5%-20% mix being apparently sweet spot for explosion, you're probably going to have to redesign everywhere that fuel lines go with an eye for propane vapours. Not fun at all.
They run at very very low pressures - in the tank it's less than about ten bar, usually eight or so. The fuel rail pressure in a modern petrol injection engine is far higher, and when you get into DI engines as you say they become hilariously high pressure.
There's not really any drama when you want to maintain it - if you want to disconnect a fuel line, you just close off the tank valve, run the engine until it cuts out from fuel starvation, and the line is more or less empty. You probably blast more HC into the air when you spray your deodorant in the morning ;-)
Given how oldschool aero engines are, I would think a suitable gas conversion would be a single-point mixer and vapouriser like on my old Range Rover (similar level of technology - massive low-compression overhead valve boat anchor). The only thing is you would need a liquid-cooled engine to get a coolant loop to feed around the vapouriser, or you'd need to come up with some other clever solution. Aircooled industrial engines running on gas used to just heat the vapouriser directly with the exhaust, but you're not allowed to do that any more!
There's still a problem that running the engine till fuel starvation is not exactly a practical option, but then arguably you could make it so that standard shut down depended on at-tank cut off valve (going to make certification a PITA). And of course you can't reuse original fuel runs because for majority of aircraft, the tank won't fit where existing tanks are.
I'm still unconvinced that you could avoid considerable reconstruction of the fuel lines - there are reasons why propane/LPG have different hazard classification, and what is easily allowed on a ground vehicle can be a big nope in an airplane.
On the more practical side, it would be dead in the water from legal issues - you'd have to recertify the plane, possibly deal with the fact that there's AFAIK no preexisting baseline for certification, and unlike 100UL you'd also add pilot & mechanic retraining - at this point you might have better ROI by shooting for the stars and going the cryogenic hydrogen route. While there are some CNG & LPG conversions around, pretty much everything seems to fall under experimental classification - something wildly different from the goal of getting G100UL declared fully equivalent to AVGAS 100LL, which would allow everyone to just switch supply.
The gas lines we use now are thin nylon with a tough PVC jacket over them, about as thick as a pencil (6mm inside bore) and flexible enough to tie your boots with ;-) It's a long way from stiff fragile copper line.
Administratively, getting the FAA to certify it? Hahahahahaha.
10bar is a terrifying amount of pressure when it comes in your direction.
10 bar is not much more than the pressure in your car tyre, and roughly same as the average road bike tyre (currently running about 12 in my road bike). If you disconnect a 10 bar compressed air line, it hisses a bit. If you disconnect a 10 bar LPG line you get a lot of very cold gas on your hand, and it'll take ages to get the mercaptan-y smell off you.
10 bar is literally 4x the pressure in my car tire and 50% over that of my road bicycle. My air compressor operates at around 10 bar but the hose is regulated down to 2.5 bar and blasts debris all over the driveway when I disconnect it. If I don't firmly hold the air tool it shoots out like a missile.
30 extra kg is a loss of about 20% of effective payload. And this says nothing of the loss in power density.
Do you have a reference for lower NOx emissions from propane? My understanding is that most NOx is a product of combustion in air (although it can come from impurities in the fuel).
As for SOx, natural gas can contain H2S which produces these, is it normally significantly less for propane?
Now, if you're developing a new plane from scratch, I guess propane in theory could be an option. But why? For aircraft, energy density of the fuel is important, and propane does pretty well here, slightly better in fact than gasoline or kerosene (jet fuel). But in practice more than offset by the requirement to store the fuel pressurized. And then you have the whole fuel infrastructure issue, how are you gonna convince airports to stock propane considering they're already struggling to find an economic case for AVGAS due to the long-term decline of general aviation.
I think if you're going to develop a new plane, it would make sense to make it use the fuel that's available, namely Jet A1 (well, maybe electric for some usecases). Sure, it's not usable in an Otto engine, but since you're developing a new plane anyway, power it by a diesel engine or turbine.
In fact, I would not at all be surprised to see approval delayed until such time as Shell or ExxonMobil can develop a competitor -- not an exact copy of GAMI's fuel, but something close enough to not violate the patent.
Whether they could be bought is a matter of choice by the owners. It’s not that Shell or Exxon couldn’t afford them, but the principals might choose not to sell for a price that’s attractive to the oil companies.
Nobody gets fired for saying no. This is how greatness fades away and a nation becomes uselessly sclerotic and irrelevant.
It's also how stability is maintained and a nation remains safe and trustworthy.
https://fee.org/articles/bureaucracy-kills-a-lesson-from-rom...
Is is telling that aviation’s “sustainable fuel” vision is the same Fischer-Tropsch chemistry that’s been abandoned for everything else because the capital cost of the machinery is too damn high.
Ground transportation has moved on to single-entity fuels that are synthesizable like 1-butanol and dimethyl ether. I can’t for the life of me see why the industry isn’t developing methane as an aviation fuel as it could even be the low cost solution in 2022 if Airbus had developed that instead of the thoroughly pizzled A380.
In fact, the only viable use of Methane in aviation fuels was by 2007 considered to be... feedstock for Fischer-Tropsch chemistry, which also can make carbon-neutral syntin that will require no complete rebuilds of planes and engines.
This is not always true. I'm a former patent examiner. At the US patent office, sometimes granting a patent (answering yes) is the safest response. If an examiner can't find a reason to reject the application in the time they are given, what choice do they have? Their decisions can't be arbitrary.
(Aside: I wonder what the effects would be of inventing and patenting environment-destroying technologies, then refusing to license them to delay their implementation. The patent system allows anyone to ban a technology, if they can convince the examiner they invented it.)
> (Aside: I wonder what the effects would be of inventing and patenting environment-destroying technologies, then refusing to license them to delay their implementation. The patent system allows anyone to ban a technology, if they can convince the examiner they invented it.)
I imagine polluting companies would ignore the patents ("efficient infringement") and/or try to invalidate the patents.
The operation of a monopoly was already possible before the patent via trade secrets (typical contemporary example, SpaceX), what the patent does is make it illegal to break the monopoly by re-inventing the technology.
If they are 50% efficient, or even 10% efficient, they won't be eliminated. They're still needed for certain basic operations in aviation.
However, if they do something with a 30% chance of a great outcome from aviation, and 1% chance of a negative scandal, that negative risk outweighs any positivity.
Five hundred and thirty seven people killed from the 737 max scandal, which showed the FAA was basically not providing any oversight of Boeing whatsoever, and even worse, was complicit in coverups: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189609/faa-boeing-737-...
Furthermore, the FAA was the last national agency in the world to ban the 737 Max from flying. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/business/boeing-737...
That lack of supervision included the FAA providing little or no oversight over Boeing using lithium ion batteries without sufficient testing, resulting in several fires on airliners.
Treating air traffic controllers so poorly - including underpaying them by nearly thirty percent, that they went on strike, and refusing to give them a shorter work week to compensate for the high stress nature of the job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
and since then, we've had decades upon decades of overworked, overstressed, understaffed air traffic controllers, which results in problems ranging from crashes due to errors to falling asleep to substance abuse:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=FAA+air+traffic+controllers+sleepi...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=FAA+air+traffic+controllers+drunk
A controller in Las Vegas has a stroke and was speaking gibberish for half an hour before anyone in the control tower noticed, likely because she was working alone and unsupervised.
Am I forgetting anything?
"Model of professionalism in civil service" my ass. This debacle over fueling is just yet another way the FAA has pointlessly stood in the way of progress to protect vested industry interests. FAA regulations are rife with all sorts of absurd shit barring a private pilot from modernizing their planes in cost effective manner or enhancing them with greater avionics capabilities.
Yes, the words "most" and "pockets of sheer insanity." I am not so simple-minded as to view an entire agency as a single, atomic entity. I recognize what they do well and am one of the harshest critics of what they do poorly, especially when the results are death. This is something I hoped I had conveyed in my original post.
This is in fact an argument against FAA: you can risk your life in many other ways in many other contexts not regulated by FAA, so why not be allowed to risk your own life in a regulated field?
Think, for example, about racing home made cars on salt flats: perfectly legal, even though you could conceivably hit someone who just happens to stroll by. Why can’t I race my home made plane over salt flats?
Also, even if you follow FAA rules, you’re still risking other people lives. Pretty much every nontrivial activity is potentially lethal to bystanders, and flying is even more so. Despite that, flying is still allowed in general. You cannot argue “activity X that has some minor risk to you and nonzero risk to bystanders should be disallowed, because you must not expose bystanders to risk”, when you are already allowed to expose them to bigger risks in other ways in the context of the same regulated activity.
You do not want to engage my actual argument, which is why you are trying to reframe it in a context where it is absurd. Of course I’m not suggesting that people should be allowed to drive 100 mph on the wrong side of busy freeway, and the reason you need to suggest that I do is that you are unable to engage what I actually say.
You don't need to attack people or be paranoid about their motives; you could use a little trust and reason, maybe even a sense of humor. I didn't read the comment after that, but I can see italics and other signs of another angry, self-righteous outburst. I guess everyone else on the Internet does it, so why not? It's working so well for our society.
This has interesting knock on effects, for example if private company ATC fucks up and gives you bad information, you don't have much in terms of options for example to dispute charges that you deliberately violated a presidential no fly zone.
Why would ATC being public or private contractor for public agency change your legal situation here?
Yes! They completely failed to notice that 5G was a thing, and that thing was going to be deployed everywhere, including near airports. They had like a decade to plan for it and any potential impact it might have on planes.
Now they're panicking and trying to hold up a nationwide 5G rollout because they were asleep at the wheel.
FCC is the one that sold problematic spectrum before work was done (and yes, work was being done, and it's not trivial to deal with spectrum change like that)
Then there was the ridiculous ruling that it was illegal for people to receive pilot training in their own airplanes, contradicting decades of prior practice and rule interpretation. That had to be undone by Congress: https://www.flyingmag.com/flight-instruction-faa/
And recently there was a ruling that essentially made go-arounds (aborted landings) illegal (if the testimony here is true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpFDRoStcd4 ).
I had faith the FAA once. No more.
Why not link to the actual ruling instead of some random YouTube video when making such a far-fetched claim?
Where does this come from? Things are permitted and developed all the time. In fact, many perceive government as overly lenient to big business, leading to disasterous results (like the Boeing plane crashes).
Where are you seeing a overabundance of 'yes'?
The small government / empower big business lobby likes to use the rhetoric of repetition-until-it-seems-like-fact, but that doesn't make it true.
- Find people who own property with lead in the ground
- Pay them for a pinky promise to never ever mine the lead
- Sell the resulting "lead offsets" to private aviators, who can
- Continue burning 100LL while claiming on social media that they have achieved "lead-neutral" flight!
If FAA won't do their job, then that power (such as it is) needs to be stripped from them and invested back in Congress.
Presumably GABI has talked to some congressional reps. So the question is: why aren't they lighting a fire under the FAA's ass to at least follow their own regulations? This seems more than worthy of a congressional hearing. Frankly, AOPA should have demanded as much, but they're probably too worried about pissing off Lycoming and Continental.
GABI also has the option to pursue redress via the courts. I don't know whether they've attempted to do so or not.
Also answerable to the elected leader of the executive branch!
Congress delegated the authority to the FAA because (in concept) the agency is staffed by people who are knowledgeable about aviation, and are better equipped to make smarter aviation related decisions.
For Congress to override the FAA you'd need some majority, in both houses, willing to make a technical decision which is directly related to airplane safety. That would require enormous amounts of time to educate Congress people, time which Congress has no interest in providing.
They created the FAA specifically to remove all aviation issues from their docket. They are not now going to medle with this one issue - that's not how the system works.
Obviously, like all good govt beaurocracies the FAA has grown big and slow and cautious and so everything takes forever. They are pretty much incentivized to keep kicking the can down the road, it is quite literally their business model.
The altimeters aren't faulty, and everywhere else the regulatory bodies for aviation, radio spectrum, aviation industry and telcos cooperated on figuring things out. Unfortunately for USA, physics doesn't bend just to accommodate bad management of radio spectrum and hilariously bad mobile telco market.
I’m generally in favor of “as local as practical”, but I think that the FAA, FCC, CDC, EPA, and a few others are cases where “as local as practical” ends up being federal.
Right now, the law says “these airplanes are allowed to use these engines”, “these engines are allowed to use 100LL”, and “100LL has the following composition”. To be legal, you need paperwork that breaks one or more of those constraints, which is what GAMI is in the process of pursuing. To get that paperwork, they have to demonstrate functional equivalence and convince the FAA to issue a supplemental type certificate (the legal paperwork that would alter the second condition above). It’s not unreasonable for the FAA to need proof. Whether they need more proof than they have is self-evidently a point of disagreement between GAMI and their supporters (I count myself among this set) and the FAA.
Somehow cross country travel works without issue. Not sure how that is so different from a state "FAA" type agency.
I'm all for market forces - where they make sense. In aviation, oversight saves lives.
Modern car engines are generally much more reliable than cars made 40+ years ago. It's quite possible that this oversight is actually costing lives by limiting innovation.
There was a big push in the 1990s to put "modern car engines" into GA planes, mostly diesel. It ... didn't go well. Turns out these car-derived engines were a lot less reliable than the good old Lycoming IO series, and much more expensive to maintain due to higher complexity (not to mention heavier, which always is a concern with airframes). And then there was the question on how long the manufacturer would provide replacement parts...
There is a push to make car engines happen with some EU-based manufacturers, most notably Diamond Aircraft, today. We'll see how that works.
Add that to the fact that new aircraft are prohibitively expensive, and we'll see manual mixture control-based engines for decades to come.