Well, I'm confused again, not that it will come as any surprise to some of those pulling the strings in the transition to unleaded avgas.
Thank You so much Russ for asking the BIG Question.
There was no organizations formed in the early 80’s when the FAA cancelled 115/145, 100/130 and 80/87. The FAA Part 135 aircraft I was working on and flying did not operate very good on this new “All Around” 100LL. The company had to change many of their operation practices and still had an increase in spark plug run-up failure regularly.
Thank you for the fine irony and the good report in the tradition of Paul Bertorelli! But as all cartels are about big money, watch your 6…
In automobile class back in the early 80’s, i took apart 2 cylinder heads. One head came off a car that ran on leaded regular fuel. The other, the car ran on unleaded fuel. Upon disassembly, the head that ran the leaded fuel, other than being gunked up with crud, was perfect. I could have literally just cleaned it up and reused everything.
The cylinder head running the unleaded fuel, the exhaust valves were mico pitted. The exhaust valve seats, were just as bad. If not worse. Many of the valve seats, were pounded up into the head. A term called valve seat recession. And the intake valves weren’t much better.
I have no idea of the age and mileage of the cylinder heads i was working on. But i certainly saw the difference in the end result, between a vehicle that ran on leaded fuel, and one that ran on unleaded fuel.
Hopefully in the 40+ years of metallurgical advancements, we’ve come a lot farther. But i don’t want to be the first one to find this out, as an exhaust valve takes it last ride, as I’m climbing out of the departure airport…
Like any commission, special council, study, or other government “initiative,” EAGLE will love the problem until the money runs out.
The EALGLE/ASTM process is starting to sound a lot like the ISO 9001 craze that hit manufacturing plants years ago. ISO 9001 started off as a method of quality assurance manufacturing. Many companies were urged (or forced) to adopt it to show customers they were producing quality products. However, it quickly became a paperwork and make work nightmare. All ISO 9001 compliance meant was that you were producing what your quality manuals said you were making. In other words, you make up the rules, then follow them, no matter how little sense they made. As long as the product that rolls off your assembly lines matched your ISO approved documentation, you were OK. The joke at the time was that a factory could produce concrete life preservers and as long as they met your quality manual specs, you were good to go. The life preservers were approved and you could stamp them with “ISO 9001” approved. Of course along with the approval came tons of paperwork, constant audits, and payments to some ISO 9001 approval agency. For many companies the overhead was just too much and the payoff too little. In fact many companies, like ours, considered the whole process a scam and of little use. EAGLE and ASTM is starting to sound a lot like ISO 9001.
It is important to understand the need for standards, and that is what the ASTM is creating - an industry consesus about how a product should be. With standards several producers can produce the product everywhere in the world and the result is availability and competition. GA-aircraft are not just produced for California, they are made for the entire world and aviation is also a world wide activity with border crossings.
Isn’t there only 1 official EAGLE fuel, from Vitol (with Swift possibly trying to get added as another EAGLE fuel)? My understanding was that G100UL is not an official EAGLE fuel.
Russ, great article. It is always about money. It would be interesting to know why GAMI didn’t want to send a barrel of their invention to ASTM? Would also be interesting to know how much of GAMI’s flesh ASTM wanted in exchange for their approval? The FAA spent years and probably a billion of taxpayer dollars approving UL fuel. I have confidence that their STC is based on knowledge. Let’s move forward with the GAMI fuel before the corrupt system bankrupts the real inventor.
Agreed. ASTM standards, among others, provide worldwide input to industrial efforts toward materials that suit all, not just the minuscule targets we are attempting to placate. For all the inventive efforts of GAMI through the work of Mr. Braly and team, the real culprit in this is the STC process itself and the pressure it put on the FAA to approve an alteration devoid of any consensus standards. Pressure they did not want and had no business trying to approve in the absence of a consensus to which it could point should the recipe go sideways.
And by the way, Russ, those who casually explain that it’s too complicated for you to comprehend are of the same mentality as the researchers who brought us thalidomide in the 50s and 60s. Yes, chemistry is complicated, but it means nothing to the guy pumping 10 gallons of gas into a tank so he can fly to breakfast with the boys.
Avgas is a very profitable product; the established players don’t want to be replaced.
This is about money, and somewhere there is surely corruption.
As for the continuing nonsense that lead is good for engines; a glider operation in this area changed to MOGAS decades ago; the result?
At least fifty percent longer cylinder life, and no issues with exhaust valve sticking; “Morning Sickness” on the Lycoming 360 and 540 engines in their fleet of towplanes.
Lead is bad for engines and people;
we have viable replacements for 100"LL".
Stop the (fiscal) footdragging and bring it on; now!
My understanding is that it was the other way around - the pressure was on GAMI to show their methodologies of testing and validation were equal-to-or-better than the ASTM process. The FAA often allows for alternative methods to be used, so their approval of G100UL is not a unique one-off case.
Keep up the good investigative reporting Russ. Speak the facts and force the critics to be transparent.
Amen. EAGLE, for all intents and purposes, has appeared for quite some time to be primarily to protect incumbent legacy fuel providers. AOPA, EAA, FAA, and all the other alphabets have done us a huge disservice under the umbrella of “safety”. In the meantime, GA gets a black eye in state after state, community after community. Like ADSB, what is needed is a national date certain tied to reality not to delay of game tactics; and incentives for refiners, FBO’s, and operators to get on board. This is the best way possible to start riding down the price curve on new fuel. We did this back in the '70s for automobiles so there is an existence proof. I’ve had a G100UL STC for my 182Q for coming up on 2 years waiting for EAGLE to stop dithering. Waiting to 2030, given what we know to be true is shameful. Topping the list for performative effort is AOPA with their twin engine test.
There are times I’ve wondered, perhaps unfairly, whether Flying Media Group will turn AvWeb into an outlet for industry and alphabet group press releases. Your piece here today, Russ, says to me that it hasn’t happened yet. Thank you for some true journalism.
Indeed, you are correct, the FAA does have that discretion, but it is generally employed in alterations for which elements of the change are known quantities, the sum of which eclipses the risk in the alteration. The FAA knows nothing about fuel (I don’t mean this in the literal sense, but in a collective measure of expertise.) and relies on a consensus when approaching new and novel concepts. Braly’s fuel is new and novel in that it is supposed to be a drop in, across the board unleaded fix to general aviation. If that were the case, the big boys would have done it years ago. But they know differently. They know lead is needed for air-cooled aircraft engines and they already know what aromatics contribute to the combustion process, some of which is problematic for anything but the most exotic valve and seat material.
The FAA was pressured by Braly’s stubborn refusal to accept shut-up and sit-down by those who said he can’t do it and it was he who stirred up Oshkosh and Sun-N-Fun. The FAA signed Braly’s STC under duress, but they signed. In essence, they caved in to the pressure. Now, they want EAGLE or PAFI or anyone else to help insulate them from blowback should the approval have to be rescinded.
They don’t “know” that lead is “needed”, and didn’t “know” that when they first added lead to avgas. What they did know back then was that lead was a pretty bad substance to use as an octane booster, but it was a quick-and-dirty solution that happened to work. I doubt any of them thought lead would be as long-term a solution as it ended up being.
I don’t buy the argument that the FAA was pressured to accept GAMI’s STC either. At least, not from outside forces. They don’t really have anything to gain through its approval. If they were truly forced to accept it, I would have expected Congress to be the one forcing them to approve it (as they did with BasicMed).
A bureaucracy’s first and main goal is to ensure the continuance of the bureaucracy. It’s second goal is to expand. Once established they are forever.
Let med proceed with the ASTM process. Some of the coming ? UL 100 fuels containg ETBE as octane enhancer. ETBE for use in piston aircraft engines do indeed have an ASTM standard paving the way for a future ASTM UL100 standard containing this component. However this ETBE standard did not evolve by itself. ASTM formed a task-force to obtain the standard. I personally took the initiative to get it formed, and I also from own pockets of my company paid for all the costs to create the standard. I chaired the task force, my secretary was a former Cessna chief engineer Cesar Gonzalez (now deceased) and later in that position a representative from AIR BP in the UK. Personally I crossed the Atlantic about 40 times all paid from own pockets. Guess how many years it took to get the ASTM D 7618 standard for ETBE? Yes -ten (10) years. We started in 2006.
Also to note we had when we started a formal approval to use ETBE for use in fuels for piston aircraft engines issued by the FAA already Dec 1 st 1995. Mr Gonzalez provided Cessna technical reports in the size of 400 pages to support the work. I personally tested UL100 AVGAS in Switzerland year 2006 and flew myself as a pilot from Switzerland to Sweden on that fuel. The FAA issued a letter to the EPA Sept 26 2000 stating that the ETBE was the component to choose as agent to increase octane numbers in an unleaded AVGAS.
What does this tell us: It all takes time and many people have to be involved in order to get a safe unleaded AVGAS.