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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

It’s disappointing but predictable. Lead use by a subset of small piston aircraft is several orders of magnitude less than when cars used leaded gas. So the general public doesn’t care that much, but aircraft owners care a great deal.

That’s a voting block which often ends up being appeased in a democracy.

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Small aircraft owners would happily pay a slight premium to get rid of leaded gas because doing so would eliminate the biggest avenue by which Karens complain about them.

The FAA is the big hurdle. IIRC they recently just approved some fuel as a replacement but I'm not sure if it was a "go start selling it" type of approval or if it's some sort of intermediary approval and there's further ring kissing to be done before people can actually buy it.

There was a huge amount of lobbying in the 1970’s which says otherwise.

The small Aircraft market is tiny and diverse as aircraft last a long time and many past manufacturers have failed. So, there wasn’t a viable alternative for many airplanes owners who couldn’t just swap to some other fuel or certified engine at the time. It’s been 50 years and people are still making the same arguments.

Uh, no. It's because when plane engines break they fall out of the sky onto things. They break when they aren't correctly modified to take the new fuel. It is not very realistic to mandate conversions for all of the (often quite old) planes today- like from manufacturers going out of business. It is not trivial to convert an engine, fuel system etc. and also meet the same performance so that things like stall and thrust and altitude are still accurate across the important ranges.

In practice, it's a choice between:

1. Banning or buying out older planes at not-insignificant cost 2. Swapping fuels and doing your best to get people to fix their planes, causing crashes 3. Playing it slow, requiring new planes to be compatible with lead-free fuel, building new lead-free infrastructure, and gradually encouraging people to transition

Currently we're doing 3 until it's determined that 1 is cheap enough to do. That said the FAA could certainly be doing more, but that's much more (IMO) on them not taking the issue seriously than on voters being appeased. Its a national agency, not the local school board.

Lead in cars was banned in the 1970’s, any actual transition would have long been played out by now. A “this will be outlawed in 30 years” would have hit in 20 years ago.

Instead the people convinced regulators to simply wait until some hypothetical perfect alternative could be made.

I really have a hard time taking such opinions seriously.

The kind of people screeching about the safety of a small user of lead are the same kind of people who will screech about planes falling out of the sky at marginally higher or lower rates. There isn't political will to pay your way out of the problem or screw people over at the barrel of a gun so the end result is you can't have your cake and eat it too. You may as well complain about the laws of physics.

Some, Aircraft manufactured after the 1970’s are still using leaded fuel.

Yet, Private Jets aren’t using leaded fuel. It’s just piston aircraft and thus a fraction of general aviation who benefits by avoiding a transition that could have finished a long time ago.

I don’t care about people using those aircraft, but the public is being harmed at 2 grams / gallon that shit adds up quickly around many small airports.

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