Plane & Pilot - August 2018

8 AUGUST 2018 ÇPlane&Pilot

T

here are things to love about lying and there are things

to hate about it. Turbulence, ramp fees and mid-TBO

overhauls make the not-so-nice list. As do fuel prices.

One thing that doesn’t make the list of things most pilots

hate about GA is our contribution of lead to the environment.

he use of just a tad of lead in our avgas is the leading con-

tributor of lead to the environment, but given the relatively

small size of the GA leet, we don’t take much heat for it.

Which is a good thing, because there aren’t any good options

available just yet. In a very real way, we are addicted to 100LL.

I’m halfway joking, of course, because none of us want to

use the stuf. It’s expensive, it costs a lot and then there’s the

price of it. If it cost a buck a gallon, we’d all want to wrap our

arms around it and give it a big hug, but for now, it’s the thing

standing between us and really afordable lying. I know, I

know. If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the engine block,

but as much as many of us are ready and willing to pony up

the dough for 60 gallons of $5 or $6 fuel for a one-way leg in

a Skylane to somewhere cool, the “able” part of the equation

is missing. For a lot of pilots, spending four hundred bucks

for a trip that’s 300 miles out and 300 miles back seems like

a lot. And if it seems like a lot to an airplane owner, then by

deinition it is a lot.

he problem is that there are few options.

Electric power is the Holy Grail. If it were here today as a

viable replacement for avgas or Jet-A burning engines, those

electric motors would be lying of the shelves. But they’re

not here, and they’re not really even close.

he other savior technology is diesel, and I’m a fan of die-

sel. Diesel aero engines are fuel eicient, quiet and cheaper

to put fuel into because they use less of it and because you

can put cheaper fuel into most of them. hat 600-mile round

trip referenced before in a diesel-powered Skylane would be

about half the price for fuel, again, because it’ll burn a lot less

fuel along the way and because the fuel could be cheaper,

especially if the engines were approved to use diesel and

not Jet-A only.

But diesels haven’t caught on because the engines them-

selves are expensive, a lot more expensive than the gas piston

engines they replace, and when you work in the cost of the

retroitting, they’re hard to justify. his fact is being blamed

for the slow sales that some speculate is the reason for

Textron Aviation’s decision to discontinue its Skyhawk 172

JT-A program. (You can still get the same basic plane with

the Continental diesel engine installed by STC after the fact,

an option few are likely to ask for, though. )

he conclusion is that we’ ll be sticking with our conven-

tional aero engines for a while but putting unleaded fuel in

them, if there winds up being a commercially viable and

afordable 100UL out there.

hat is a far bigger “if ” than it was just a few months ago.

In June, the FAA announced that it was pushing back the

date for its approval of a 100 LL replacement after it found

there were too many diferences between the two candidate

fuels, from Shell and Swift, and 100LL. What this means is

anybody’s guess because the FAA has ofered no details. But

it presumably means that coming up with a plug and play

fuel won’t be as easy as we’d all hoped, though none of this

almost decade-long program has been easy.

What remains to be seen is how available those 100LL

replacement fuels will be and how much they’ll cost. Will

they be cheaper than 100LL? With all the investment that will

need to be put into development and production and delivery,

it’s hard to see how they could be anything but substantially

more expensive at the pump than 100LL. hough I hope I’m

wrong about that. Because 100LL is going away soon, and

we’re deinitely going to need a new fuel to do our avgas thing.

PRESERVING HISTORY

he irst post restoration of the B-17 Flying Fortress Memphis

Belle is a great story. An historic airplane, Memphis Belle

was famous during and after WWII. It was the irst B-17 to

complete 25 bombing missions in Europe and return with its

crew intact, an achievement that was about both luck and

skill. he captain of the bomber, Robert Morgan, named the

plane after his wartime sweetheart. Margaret Polk inspired

100LL Crisis

The unleaded future just got cloudy.

GOING DIRECT

By Robert Goyer

PORTRAIT: LARA TOMLIN