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Comment by jonititan | Hacker News Reader

That has more to do with problems of carb icing and similar on legacy engines. It's very expensive to get regulatory approval for new engines and even more so to then get approvals to retrofit them to legacy or historical aircraft. 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.

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> It's very expensive to get regulatory approval for new engines and even more so to then get approvals to retrofit them to legacy or historical aircraft.

"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.

I seem to recall also issues with typical automobile fuel vaporising too easily at lower pressure, which isn't a problem in a car which likely won't be driving above 4000m ASL... but 4000m is nothing special for even cheap (comparably) non-ultralight plane.

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