Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

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There has been no push in the market to get small GA off leaded gas. There has been no extra tax even. As a result, new planes, being delivered today, are shipping with engines requiring leaded gas, which perpetuates this problem.

After decades - does it make public policy sense to still sell NEW planes that REQUIRE leaded gas?

I don't believe so.

Literally every other method of propulsion, some with much stronger claims in terms of life utility, have moved off leaded gas. Ie, the ambulance, the race cars the everything, except GA.

Reality -> GA has a well connected / rich pool of users with influence. If you had a bunch of poor minorities spraying even trace amounts of lead over someone's nice golf course my guess is you'd be getting well off activists to shut you down in no time for environmental or other reasons.

On the contrary, there's now several unleaded options coming to market and now available at certain FBOs. UL94 seems to work well in continental and lycoming power plants that power most Cessna 1XX aircraft. The issue has largely been building the distribution network.

Which airplanes are on the market today that require leaded gas? Specifically which power plants?

Turbocharged Lycontinentals, and higher-compression (9.5:1 or better iirc) stock Lycontinentals.

Within the subset of certified, normal category piston aircraft, you will find one of these two on a sizable proportion of those airplanes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_O-360

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_IO-550

To my knowledge some ultralights use regular unleaded (called MOGAS in some aviation contexts) and of course anything that you can buy an airline ticket for outside of perhaps Alaska will use jet fuel.

I mean in current production aircraft.

It appears that most versions of the O-360 can run on mogas, or unleaded gas of some sort.

https://www.lycoming.com/sites/default/files/SI1070AB%20Spec...

Indeed, there does appear to be a 100UL drop in out here too.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2021/july/27/ga...

I think at least all models of the Cirrus, one of the best selling general aviation planes right now, require 100 octane gas.

To be clear, none require leaded fuel, per se, but until this year there was no approved unleaded 100-octane fuel.

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