Hacker News Reader

Comment by radar1310 | Hacker News Reader

I know this from experience that when we switched from leaded to unleaded gas in the 70’s for a fleet of 50 cars, it caused spark plug fowling in every one of them due to flakes of carbon coming off piston heads. I don’t think you want spark plug fowling at 12,000 feet.

View on HN

Airplane spark plugs foul constantly, primarily because of the large amount of lead in avgas. Many airplane engines (e.g., Lycoming O-360) are already approved to run on unleaded fuel and have done so for years with vastly improved plug fouling. Additionally, spark ignition engines have redundant plugs (actually, entire ignition systems) to reduce the effect of this issue.

How many people do you think have died or had their quality of life significantly reduced due to lead?

They need to figure it out eventually here, not like they haven't had time.

Is the amount of lead that airplanes put out actually relevant for lead poisoning?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/

Yes. It's not the _worst_ thing we're doing to the general populace, by probably a decent margin, but it's not good.

All lead exposure is bad.

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.

Yes.

https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History - by Veritasium

Well, during dieselgate the experts apparently found a way to count deaths. Maybe we could call the same experts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com