hindsight2020

As far as the fuels, "Comparably priced" ain't good enough. We need to break the 100LL racket for good, for the sake of GA. I'm sick and tired of flying beat-out 70 y/o technology lycos and continentals because they don't want to allow competition come in and eat their lunches. So we gotta live with "affordable" 4 time overhauled, lead fouled contraption while paying horrible economies of scales premium on highly toxic gas the industry would be better off phasing out already.

I run 87 octane unleaded on my O-200 and it loves it. 100LL has about 4 times the lead content the engine was designed to manage, yet aviation "red" 87 ceased to exist eons ago, and I'm forced to keep the continental with the busted carb, manual mixture and expensive overhaul barriers. Even so, I have a full 50% cost reduction by running 87 unleaded versus 100LL and since the engine is of low compression, I'm not paying a premium for octane I'm not taking advantage of and extra lead I don't need in my engine anyways. What does industry do in reaction? Stifle efforts to make unleaded available to GA. No pumps at the airport and I gotta jump through hoops to find non-ethanol gas outside and once I do, I gotta cart it to the airplane as if I was stealing something. This works for me since a C-150 only holds 22.5 usable, but for high capacity airframes, yeah the pain of going through that hoop stifles momentum for the average owner (never mind part 135 you can't even use mogas per regulatory schemes).

Lyco and continental just don't want to let the gig up and for the sake of GA we need to break that cartel. In 2009 it is just completely artificial to have to accept TEL on our engines for some anachronistic 70year old design consideration to valve seating (which I've barely paid attention anymore on my O-200 as I run almost exclusively on unleaded). We should have been running on unleaded-designed engines a long time ago. Bio fuels and fancy alternatives is fine, knock yourself out, but we should make the use of automotive unleaded widespread. It's good to hear the guys in south africa are making progress to that end, engine wise.

I just flew a rotax equipped experimental today and I burned 4 gallons of 87 unleaded for 1.5 hours of cheap pure flying fun. No carb heat, no mixture control, no lead fouling, no $4.50/gal price of entry to do what I love. Only thing I need is to get 1970s era production numbers on unleaded engine technology and we can truly get the experimental category becoming market price setters and kill off these leaded gas dinosaurs for good.