Court Decision On G100UL Use Expected Wednesday

[Ehsif727]

The FAA needs to Pull the permission to use lead in fuel because of the danger it can cause to an engine which can reduce safety of flight.

[dbier]

Are you a pilot?! You want the FAA to force all piston planes to summarily move to a new fuel that could damage their planes or worse - kill them? If you are a pilot I’ll let you use any of the proposed lead-free fuels for 6-12 months and then - if you or your plane is undamaged - I’ll be happy to use it because I do not like the lead deposits in my engine.

[JoeDB]

We have spent 50 years screwing around and doing not much but kick the can down the road. Lead WILL go away. We NEED to fix this before it gets fixed for us in a way we won’t like.
Also note that 100LL is a very poor “drop in” replacement for 80 octane, many of us had endless issues with lead fouling of plugs and sticking valves. It would totally fail the level of scrutiny the new fuels are getting.
Once Again - 94 octane avgas is the fix for about 75-80% of our airplanes with no formula issues, it is literally 100LL without the lead.

[Aeroeng]

I agree, 94UL should be offered alongside 100LL for those that need it.

[Flyingmusician]

I’ve known Mike personally for more than 30 years. He’s hardly a “shade tree mechanic”. He is an engineer and took to this study after a mutual friend showed him the staining and peeling paint from putting G100 in his aircraft.

Have you watched the videos? They are absolutely compelling. He shows his A/B comparisons with G100 and 100LL.

If you don’t believe the videos, get some G100 and duplicate what’s he’s done. If your findings are different, publish your own video rebutting his observations. All you need is a cell phone, avgas and a YouTube account.

Fly safe.

[ETxFlyer]

Unfortunately, it seems as if you’ve missed the entire point. Your tenure with Mike is irrelevant as are his videos. Anybody can produce quite compelling video and be absolutely wrong for all the right reasons. Cell phones make terrible lab instruments. You need more; a lot more. You need a properly equipped lab, a sufficient budget and people who know what they’re doing. You need to use ASTM methods, you have to have access to the rubber compounds/paints in use and you need time to complete a planned study. This is not something that can or should be sorted out on YouTube or TikTok. I don’t know Mike, never met him, know nothing about him. If he’s a trained scientist, he should know better than to attempt to sort this issue out with lasagna pans and a set of calipers. Material science doesn’t work that way. Particularly with rubber. Regardless of his intentions, he has done the public no service. I’d have a lot more respect for his activities if social media was not involved. At its core, what you ask is to accept that Mike has, all by himself, discovered an undesirable interaction that completely escaped all the previous testing at FAA and AOPA . That by itself invites incredulity given how long this fuel has been under test. Skepticism is at the heart of good science. You don’t start with the conclusion. You end with it. This needs proper investigation to sort out whether any of these accusations has any validity at all. That won’t happen on YouTube.

[dbier]

You seem very confident that his analysis was poorly done - would you be willing to fly with G100UL for 6 months or so in your plane and let us know how it works out? Despite my desire to get the lead deposits out of my engine, I won’t use G100UL even if it was available until there is more real world evidence that it is safe to use. I’m not alone.

[jjbaker (Jason J. Baker)]

Not allowing comments on youtube videos is a very smart thing to do. You should open your own channel (on any topic you desire) and we’ll compare notes on how long it takes you to rip your hair out.

Alternatively, open a aviation news site. Or a Fecalbook page or any of the other “go viral quick” pages. There are a lot of honks. I don’t even want to know what kind of emails this guy gets.

I am 50 years old and only remember a short period of childhood when lead in aviation fuel was not a topic.

I mean, humans shoot stuff into space, perform robotic surgeries, attack and bomb enemies to shreds from hundreds of miles away, but we cannot, for the life of Christ, have a fuel in our airplanes that is lead free.

“Sumtin Wong!”

[Flyingmusician]

I agree with you completely that scientific method needs skepticism. Super lab with a legion of white coated scientists sporting clip boards with access to HPLC and mass spec instrumentation would be great.

I would ask, where are the results from GAMI’s testing and research like that.

Since Mike first took this on due to results from the greatest lab of all (real world results), perhaps we can call his efforts a “first order analysis “. To me, at a minimum it then begs the question “what testing was done with G100 BEFORE announcing that is a fleet wide solution”.

My personal take away from these is Mike is making observations and asking “what’s going on here?”…

I also know the owner of the 421 in question. I’ve seen it in the maintenance hangar for pretty much every annual it’s had since its purchase. I saw it at the last annual inspection. In all these years, none of the brown staining or other such issues had been present before he put the G100 in the plane.

As with anything, when something changes on a system, the first question we ask is, “what changed”?

Best regards,

[NopeNotThat]

I have certain parts that need to swell to operate properly too… don’t hold it against me alrighty?

It really can’t be that hard to hire an independent lab to do a test and prove the matter. Get an old cirrus, put G100UL in it and fly it for 30 days. Before/after photos breakdown. Rinse repeat at 60 days. if at 180 days there are no issues, repeat again at 360 days and if no issues, then mark that plane model good to go. I’d recommend starting with the G2 and working your way up based on #'s sold.

[Flyingmusician]

Hard? Not really. Expensive, yes.

First item of interest would be a list of ingredients in the G100.

Then look at all the things that those ingredients do to the various materials that are in the fuel system of a typical GA aircraft.

Lots more experiments after that but those are all the things that should have already been done PRIOR to rolling out a big batch of G100 to experiment on the fleet…

Fly safe.

[William_Kelly]

My local airport in southern CA wants nothing to do with 100UL due to the infrastructure, i.e. storage and handling facilities that will be required, in addition to the standard 100LL. I don’t blame them. Any effect of lead on the environment due to GA is like the size of one pin head in a pin factory. Most of the politicians pushing it have no technical expertise on the topic whatsoever.