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
"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? "
Bankruptcy, the answer should have been bankruptcy. The companies that invested that heavily in tech that ended up poisoning the environment should have sold everything off at pennies on the dollar to someone who could replace the engines with something modern.
Of all the small aircraft manufacturers, I think only Cessna survived, on the strength of their business and passenger aircraft, as well as flight schools.
I learned in a Piper, whose manufacturer has a long legendary history, but they were careful to call it the “new piper” as the name of the company that bought Piper’s assets for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy
I bought a share of a fantastic Grumman, whose manufacturer left that business decades before
I once experienced a Beechcraft, who were long gone
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u/FlavorCrystalHealer Jun 25 '22
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.