Your fuel and lubricant expert Ben Visser recently wrote in his column that it would be insane to try and develop an unleaded replacement for 100LL (Unleaded avgas: You’d have to be insane to try to develop it, June 22 issue). What’s to develop? Leave out the lead and 100LL automatically becomes 95UL. Since virtually the entire GA fleet is already technically capable of running on 93-octane car gas, why would that be insane?
As it is, a majority of us are paying at least a dollar a gallon more for avgas to save the occasional million dollar warbird or Piper Malibu from detuning or upgrading to a turbine. How’s that for insanity? And while we’re saving those poor souls from fixing their engines to run on modern gas, the rest of us get to dig chunks of lead out of our spark plugs and a change of $5 a quart oil every 25 hours.
The definition of insanity is that 100LL still exists in 2007.
JON BAKER
Cypress Texas