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Comment by S201 | Hacker News Reader

> is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much

I wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already. Yes, GA isn't exactly cheap, but there are many upper middle class families with RVs, boats, trucks, and vacation homes that are more expensive than a shitbox 1970's Cessna is and no one whines about how it's only the 1% that enjoy those pursuits. Not to mention the many more people in partnerships and flying clubs to split the fixed costs across multiple people.

The short of it is that GA is an expensive hobby just as many other upper middle class hobbies are, but an accessible one for many more than the 1%. The people that proclaim how it's only the ultra rich who enjoy aviation are admitting that they know absolutely nothing about the actual general aviation community.

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"only the 1% fly" is not true, but "only the 11% fly" is a fact [1].

About the 1%: "1% of the population emits 50% of the commercial aviation's emission". You can keep going like that to show that it is indeed reserved to an upper-part of the society. Maybe the ultra-rich are not the only one flying, but they are responsible for a bigger part of the problem than the upper middle class.

Maybe the misunderstanding comes from the fact that we're looking at the global population. Global warming being a global problem, looking only at the population of your region is not a sufficient reasoning. I live in Switzerland, I guaranty that it's a lot more than 11% of the population that flies. At the end of the day, it's a question of moral and of fairness: do we want to live a life-style which can't be generated to the entire global population and which will ultimately lead to extreme conditions for future-generations and poorer social-classes than ours ? Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences ? My personal answer is that it should not be a personal decision, but that politicians should keep these numbers to start making laws such as taxing kerosene to the same level as cars' fuel.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

you aren’t going to foist those kinds of global limits on the rest of the world, especially not with billions of people in asia emerging from poverty for the first time. They’re going to consume, fly, eat meat and interact with power-hungry AIs. The only way forward is through engineering our way towards minimizing the impact of these activities. The CFC ban was only successful because it was easy to replace them.

Then we aren’t going to achieve it because there is no solution to emissions from air travel that doesn’t look like vapourware.

I've come around to believing this as well, but the problem is that that also means that humanity is most likely doomed. Yet another reason I'm glad I never wanted to have children, but now seeing them just makes me sad.

> Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences?

This isn't an aviation unique topic. You can replace "fly" in that sentence with countless other activities and the same tradeoff applies as virtually every activity currently involves carbon emissions at some point.

There is a massive difference between an airliner's emissions flying from US to Europe and your local GA pilot cruising to the next town over to get lunch on the weekend though. Does that person need to fly to do that? No, they could drive. But the guy that wants to go cruise around the lake all day on his boat or drive his semi-truck sized RV to go camping for the weekend doesn't need to do either of those activities yet no one here has a moral problem with that.

I’m working on getting my PPL now and it’s a lot of work. Claims of elitism are going to be thrown around for anything that is difficult and worthwhile.

Flying is not the issue. Carbon emissions are. That sounds like something that can be resolved to varying degrees of satisfaction one way or another.

> Flying is not the issue. Carbon emissions are.

Are you flying without carbon emissions? I believe this is possible now, and in fact the best use I've seen for electric planes is takeoff/landing training because their range is so limited.

> wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already

It seems to be a European obsession. Generously, because intercontinental flights are super cheap compared to similarly-scheduled and more eco-friendly rail. (As well as to America. Our mandatory taxes are more than a budget European flight.)

Less generously, because it's a popular bogey bear.

GA involves spraying lead over and poisoning the (mostly low income) communities that live near airports. Probably the most evil hobby you could possibly take up in modern society.

No longer, there's a generally certified lead-free fuel available that's rolling out over the next years [1], and on top of that there's fully electric ultralights.

[1] https://www.flyingmag.com/g100ul-avgas-replacement-set-to-so...

the only reason it’s so hard to get rid of 100LL is because the regulations make it so. The automotive industry was able to get rid of lead 50 years ago.

Alright, here we go yet again with the "leaded gas from GA is going to kill us all!" scare mongering.

First, the GA fleet worldwide uses 500 tons of lead per year. Compared to 5,000,000 tons when leaded car gas was in use. That's a 99% reduction in lead pollution, so let's not be so dramatic and claim that flying a piston GA plane is "evil" and that we're all going to die from it and how it's poisoning low income communities in particular. Last I checked there are many middle and upper middle class neighborhoods that exist near regional airports. I know this all too well because those are the same NIMBYs that move in next to an airport that has existed there for the past century and then try to close it because of noise complaints.

Second, since I'm sure you don't know, most GA planes can fly perfectly fine on unleaded gas. Some engines are diesel and some burn Jet A (the same as airliners), none of which have lead. Some small trainer aircraft are electric now too.

Third, unleaded G100UL exists, is certified, and is actively being rolled out. If only we could get the FAA to stop doing what they always do, which is move as slow as glaciers about anything related to GA. I'm not going to defend leaded gas, we all want to see it gone if for nothing else than to take away this ridiculous talking point from the ignorant. It should have been done 50 years ago if the FAA wasn't boneheaded, but I'm also not going to loose sleep over burning a minuscule amount of lead when natural lead sources and lead pipes/paint still exist in the world.

By the way, my home water source is a well 250ft from the end of a runway. I've had lab tests run on it for lead and it's well below the EPA limit. I put my health where my mouth is, I look forward to the day when it's all unleaded fuel being burned but until then it's not something that concerns me.

I feel your position should not be universal: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/

Maybe you should read a study before citing it:

> On the basis of distance to airport coefficients, children living within 500 m, 1,000 m, or 1,500 m of an airport had average blood lead levels that were 4.4, 3.8, or 2.1% higher, respectively, than other children.

> Based on the geospatial and statistical analysis presented above, lead from avgas may have a small (2.1–4.4%) but significant impact on blood lead levels in children who live in proximity to airports where avgas is used. The magnitude of the estimated effect of living near airports was largest for those children living within 500 m and decreased in a monotonic fashion out to 1,500 m.

2-4% higher doesn't exactly scream environmental crisis to me. Especially when it's limited to an area under a mile from known locations and can be easily avoided if one wishes.

> Although controlling for individual- and group-level confounders attenuated the association between logged blood lead levels and residential proximity to an airport, evidence of a deleterious relationship remained. In the adjusted models, control variables behaved as expected: Relative to being screened in the winter season, children tested in the spring, summer, or fall had increased blood lead levels, on average. Residence in poor and minority neighborhoods was also associated with elevated lead levels. In contrast, recently constructed housing units were associated with decreased mean lead levels.

Interesting how the correlation isn't as strong as one would imply and there's other factors at play too. If you close all of the airports it's not going to drop lead exposure to zero.

So let me re-iterate my original point again: Obviously 4.4% elevated lead levels (in the worst case, ~1,500ft from an airport) isn't something to accept as "this is fine." Instead of taking the burn it down approach, close all airports, ground the GA fleet, and destroy an entire industry, let's get the FAA off their butts and get G100UL rolled out across the board so we can stop this silly argument about a tiny percentage of lead exposure. Which, mind you, is peanuts compared to lead pipes still in use.

There are more recent papers than that. In any case, I've read enough medical papers to realise that they generally assume a unimodal distribution and force everything into that. Getting a measurable increase in blood lead level would be enough for me to never take my family to live near an airport. So the poor get stuck with such choices, which was the point of the GP.

There are also many studies demonstrating the negative health effects of living within a similar radius to a highway or any other major road, which encompasses most land in every major city. It's not like car emissions are perfectly clean because of unleaded gas and catalytic converters. They're cleaner than before the introduction of those things, but any emissions still carry health impacts so why are we demonizing the comparatively tiny GA fleet here? The only escape from any form of human pollution is to live far out in a rural area, but I'm willing to bet you've made a tradeoff of the convenience and economical benefits of being near a city/some town in exchange for exposure to some degree of pollution.

Indeed, that's why those that live near busy roads tend to be poor.

but "upper middle class" in the US is the 1% ! I think it starts at something like 60k income per family member (so 120k for a couple)

You have a funny notion of "the 1%." Unless you're in a very low cost of living area $60k in the US is barely scraping by, even $120k/yr in high COL areas like the Bay Area is basically a poverty wage. At large, something like 12% of US households are over $200k/yr. The top 1% of income is considerably higher than that so I have no idea where you're getting $60-120k from unless you're comparing against global incomes, but that's not accounting for local cost of living levels making it an apples-to-oranges comparison.

yes I'm talking about the global 1%. i.e. us, who are polluting far far more than our fair share

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