I would urge anyone on this thread who is mad and to write a letter to the address at the bottom of the post.
It will be a heck of a lot more effective than just commenting here even if it feels like a mere drop in the bucket.
I do write letters to my representatives and such. Unfortunately, I think either action (writing letters or commenting here) have near zero impact. In my experience, you get a canned response. If you're lucky, that response actually talks about the concerns you raised, but usually is just loosely related and is mostly fluff. Sometimes it's completely unrelated. Sometimes they simply ignore you and never respond at all.
It feels like more of our government is broken or perverted than is actually functioning correctly and beneficially.
Yes. It’s my understanding the goal of the US government is to maintain the status quo. It doesn’t much matter that the status quo is a Kafka-esque dystopian nightmare. It’s working as intended.
In other words: I’m closing this bug report; working as intended
Then kids turn 18 and the mask drops and — at least for me — the number of WTFs is never ending. I’m 46yro and I still don’t understand why I was told so many lies… except of course I do understand: adults don’t want to explain their shittyness to a bunch of kids.
Just imagine if our collective parents had to deal with a generational outcry demanding they stop fucking around, stop stealing from our future, stop lying, etc.
Society as we know it would end, necessarily replaced by something more just.
Can’t have that! The status quo it is then. FML; YMMV
Hiding the status quo is something you'd do to maintain the status quo, just as much as not knowing the status quo reduces your wants to get away from it
I don't mean to excuse any of the B.S. that's going down, but I feel it's important to take the long view, to see the thing in the light of history. Not for nothing is it said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.", eh?
2. there are many implementations of democracy possible and extant, so even if we think democracy is the ideal government that is still no defense of the US
I'd like to see an attempt to go back to the original 30,000 per rep. We have the technology now to make that entirely feasible.
Also, the reps themselves don't often answer letters, but have aides that can do that based on the reps position.
I agree that congresspeople and senators represent too many people to do so accurately, but enlarging the congress would cause other problems. Devolving power to the states (and municipalities) would likely be more effective.
I'd rather hear that my representative disagrees with me than receive some BS noncommital answer that dodges the issue or tries to straddle both sides of an issue.
The bland, nothing replies are a sign that they're not even bothering to register your opinion.
"We [insert office] are excited by your interest and have taken your stance into our records. While [office] must remain entirely impartial, we can inform you that, unfortunately, as of now our records indicate that your stance is only shared by a minority (45%) of the vote suggestions and support letters we have received. If you feel strongly and wish to alter [office's] actions towards this, please continue your support by gaining interest in your community."
Perhaps people participate more under this different system.
/s
On paper I was a fan of isobutanol but that didn't pan out either.
This approach clearly can work, and is only not working because of an incompetent administrator.
This really shouldn't be determined by amateur pilots preference, or even the FAA, it is up to the rest of us who are having lead rained down on us, to demand change.
Without a workable substitute for 100LL, banning it is not practical.
Off the top of my head, they mainly use magnetos instead other forms of ignition, have dual mag setups so that one can fail and the engine will still run.
And lead-based fuel lubrication is simpler than other forms.
Some work is being done on diesel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_diesel_engine#Modern_... - and jets of course run off of kerosene basically.
And a brand-new plane is really hard to build out cost-wise, much of the aviation fleet is very, very old.
Legally (the subject that requires FAA approval) is that the type-certificate (the legal basis for certification and authority to operate) for these engines specifies the use of 100LL and the standard for 100LL is a composition-based standard, not a performance-based standard. If it doesn't have the prescribed amount of TEL, it's definitionally not 100LL, even if it would meet the performance requirement of the engine.
Then, from an engineering standpoint (the subject that companies are working on in order to propose fuels to the FAA via PAFI or GAMI seeking multi-model Supplemental Type Certificate), aircraft engines are stone-age in complexity and are overwhelmingly air-cooled, fixed timing [except during starting], and operate for hours on end at 75%+ of rated power. Your auto is water-cooled, has variable timing, and typically runs at 8-15% of rated power. An aircraft engine has to run reliably with cylinder head temperatures of 460ºF or more (your car's cylinders are much more tightly controlled as a result of the water cooling).
Why can't airplanes use a different engine? Airplanes are (legally) certified to use a specific engine and have had extensive flight testing to determine takeoff/landing distances, fuel consumption figures, etc. Those engines are (legally) certified to use a specific fuel [or list of fuels]. Automobile engines have a horrible track record when attempted to be converted to aviation usage. Small, normally aspirated engines are able to run on low-octane, ethanol-free pump gas. The aircraft with high-powered turbo-charged engines represent around 25% of the engines. Because of their higher utilization, those engines burn around 75% of the avgas purchased in a year. (These are the CapeAir fleet, skydive operators, etc.)
Wouldn't turbo-charged engines burn jet A-1 rather than avgas?
(Note that what aviation considers high-compression is laughably low-compression in modern automobiles.)
(For airplanes vs. car engines, probably other effects are more significant, like higher head temps, poorer mixture due to carburetors, fixed ignition and whatnot.)
An IO-550 is a very common 6-cylinder aircraft engine. 550 cubic inches (just over 9 liters) of displacement from 6 cylinders (5.25” bore x 4.25” stroke, redline typically 2700 RPM).
This is one of the reasons why I think almost all of the innovation in GA, including modern powerplants, electronic ignitions, advanced avionics electronic systems, and even safety systems, is happening in the Experimental category, not in certified factory-built airplanes. If I owned a Cessna and decided to so much as run a USB charger out to the panel, the FAA would come down on me like a ton of bricks. But I could replace the engine monitor or autopilot on my E/AB category airplane, and the FAA doesn't even care. Hell, I could replace the entire engine with something I invented in my basement, and all I have to do is re-do Phase I testing.
(BTW, your USB charger example is a minor modification, able to signed off by an A&P.)
The FAA says no such thing. There are modern FADEC piston engines:
* https://www.lycoming.com/engines
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro_Engine_E4
and you can new planes with them:
* https://www.flyingmag.com/we-fly-diamond-da40-ng/
It's just there are (over) 100K pre-FADEC planes out there with perfectly fine "stone-age" engines, and few people want to spend US$ 40K on a new engine when they can overhaul their current one for half the price when the time comes.
So what remains is for the existing fleet to eventually be retired and replaced by newer aircraft that use newer engines. But most light single piston aircraft being sold today still use older engine designs that require leaded fuel! And newer aircraft are so expensive, it's more economical to keep aircraft from the seventies still going. Newer aircraft are expensive because the certification and insurance requirements are extremely expensive. For example, aircraft manufacturers get sued for accidents caused by pilot error on a regular basis, and so they need insurance for that.
"Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988, according to a report cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics,[14] a 2,000-fold increase in 24 years." --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...
So light aircraft are stuck running ancient engine designs that require leaded fuel.
There is some progress. One manufacturer uses a modern engine that runs on jet fuel (basically a diesel piston engine like in some cars). But that doesn't stop new aircraft being extremely expensive, so it looks like we're still stuck with mostly an old fleet that uses lead for a long time yet.
1) world-wide certification
2) world-wide base of trained mechanics
3) already widely deployed (you can't just "swap" engines on a plane design)
Several newer designs in Europe have been playing around with Diesel engines again, because thanks to being heavier fraction it doesn't have as much evaporation problem of gasoline, and also diesels are by design very tolerant of fuel types. Most importantly, a plane with an aviation diesel engine can just as well use non-ethanol-added diesel from car gas station, or any of the Jet-A1 compatible fuels available on airfields (pretty sure everything that isn't accidental leftover of SR-71 blackbird operation will work just fine).
While combustion process is tolerant, modern high-pressure pumps not so much. I don't think you can run automotive engine on Jet-A without detrimental effects on lifetime of injection system (as it uses fuel as lubricant). Does these aviation diesels use some specially hardened pumps?
(I want nothing more than to be able to buy G100UL.)
Notice "not poisoning children" is not on their list of requirements. No, just that it doesn't cost you any money.
If I just took TEL and sprayed it over your house, I'd be arrested and have to pay tens of thousands for remediation. But do it in a plane? No problem!
You don't have to fly. You choose to poison us.
The reason leaded avgas isn't solved yet is because by itself it's a pretty small problem as far as things that are poisoning us and out planet go.
Obviously we're making progress, because people still care, but it's not getting resources in the same way that clean electrical energy is because it's a much smaller problem.
I would be surprised if there's a turbine out there that can be rented for less than $1000.
The propeller on a prop plane can be attached to either a piston or a jet engine. (Or mostly in smaller or experimental planes, an electric motor)
So, in the example of Porter, those are Dash-8s and that's a jet engine. Yes it has the propellers on the front like those old-timey aeroplanes you saw in black and white, but you'll notice that the propellers are on the front of a jet engine. See, the engine needs spinning blades inside it to work, compressing air to run the engine, but you can choose whether to expend the resulting energy on producing yet more spinning motion for propellers (a turboprop engine) or to shove lots of fast air out of the back (a turbofan engine)
A jet engine does not use leaded gasoline, that would be crazy. Whether it is spinning a propeller or just shoving fast moving air out the back, the jet engine runs on kerosene. This is still nasty stuff, but it does not have lead in it.
To be even more technical, the difference between turbine and piston engines is in the combustion chamber: open combustion in the case of a turbine and closed in the case of a piston.
Finally, there are turbine engines that run just fine on LL100 (leaded avgas). Garrets, for example. One can even mix gas and jet-A in those. It is not recommended to run avgas for more than 1000 hours though due to potential issues with lead deposits. Some military jets engines are designed to run on almost anything combustible except maybe coal dust (I am exaggerating somewhat, of course).
Just relax the certifications. It's surely less dangerous to the overall population than continuing to spew lead.
"The problems caused by rules we oppose upon ourselves are so bad that we can't solve the real biochemical issues caused by airborne lead" may not be the compelling argument you think it is.
> Unfortunately if you put regular pump gasoline in an aircraft you are going to have serious problems. Not least because of the bioethanol mixed in which will degrade the pipes.
There are plenty of fueling options other than driving down to Shell and picking up some E10. There are also readily available fuel lines that aren't degraded by ethanol.