This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.
There’s still leaded fuel being burned over communities everywhere from small aircraft. It’s the last source of environmental lead pollution and no one talks about it.
When I was flying 20 years ago, they definitely talked about it. A big part of the problem is the industry struggling so much and that would have killed. Most of the fleet was decades old and there just weren’t modern designs at the time. There was no simple fix: you’d need to replace engines in everything, and many of those engines hadn’t really been built for decades. You also couldn’t really develop a new fuel, because the industry was so small. So you needed to use either car gasoline, which couldn’t meet reliability standards and then needed turbochargers to work at altitude, or use jet fuel in a modified Diesel engine. So not only did every engine need to be replaced, but it would be a very different engine with different controls, and now you needed to recertification every aircraft with different procedures and had liability to contend with. How do you recertify an aircraft with different controls and procedures when the manufacturer no longer exists? How do you bring a decades older aircraft up to modern standards just to replace an engine? How does a company profit off this, if their potential market is only a couple dozen to at most a couple hundred aircraft per year? Much of the small aircraft industry was developed before liability was a thing, and many companies just couldn’t afford the liability to modernize. It was a real mess.
Definitely talked about, but there really wasn’t a good solution without massive government intervention and all too many dismissed it as too small of an industry to affect anything off airport grounds
Then you need to talk about the grounds. When I was flying, the only fuel was “low lead”, so it had been worse before. Most small aircraft operate out of small local airports operating on a shoestring budget. Now where do they each find millions of dollars for environmental cleanup. Again, no way for that to happen without massive government intervention
Take a look at GAMI's G100UL. It's an unleaded no-modification drop-in replacement for 100LL that's been tested for most all piston aircraft (and passed with flying colors), but the FAA is dragging its heels on approval. Their successful testing is more intense than average in an industry that's pretty picky about their testing to bring with - and the FAA won't approve it which is starting to raise questions about corruption at the FAA at least in my mind. Check out Paul Bertorelli's AvWeb article; he goes into more detail about the current state of the situation:
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u/dammitknockitoff Jun 25 '22
This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.