Two notes on Paul B’s take:
- “[U]nleaded 100 octane will cost more than 100LL. So why rush into selling a more expensive fuel until you’re absolutely forced to?” I think Paul’s colleague, Rick Durden, got it right in the June 2022 issue of Aviation Consumer: “[T]he bottom-line profit margin on car gas is only a couple of pennies/gallon, but the bottom-line margin of profit for 100LL is estimated to be in the range of 50 to 80 cents per gallon. It appears that there are powerful financial forces that want to drag out the end date for the sale of 100LL as many years as possible. How do you do that? By creating yet another committee, which is, as author Robert Heinlein said, ‘a life-form with six or more legs and no brain.’ Committees have a way of making sure a problem does not get solved until the date for the committee to dissolve.” An interesting question might be: Is anyone at FAA profiting from this? The answer might be found in where people who leave FAA go to work after leaving.
- The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) recently announced “Environmental protection requirements for supersonic transport aeroplanes” and “Prototype Technical Design Specifications for Vertiports,” in both instances placing itself firmly ahead of FAA in the development and deployment of actionable technical standards for new civil aviation technologies. Might it be wise for Mr. Braly to focus on leveraging his 12 years of technical data to obtain EASA certification of G100UL first and play catch-up with FAA later? Europe takes environmental concerns seriously; the European market may welcome G100UL more enthusiastically than we will in the States and, although the European market for piston civil aviation fuel is probably small compared to the U.S. market, EASA approval is something FAA could not ignore.