Finding an unleaded replacement to 100LL is going to be a group effort with participation necessary from everyone involved, from FAA and EPA officials, to fuel refineries, fuel distributors, aircraft and engine manufacturers, airports, and more.
“Not one of these can solve this on their own,” says Earl Lawrence, executive director of the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service. “We need to bring everybody together.”
And that’s just what happened March 16-17, 2022, when the first meeting of the Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions (EAGLE) initiative was held.
More than 170 participants were in the meeting, with representatives from aviation associations, aircraft and engine manufacturers, fuel refineries and distributors, the FAA and EPA.
Their task: Find an unleaded alternative to 100LL by 2030 that does not compromise safety and works for all general aviation piston aircraft.
Finding that unleaded fuel is imperative — and the initiative wants to do it “no later” than 2030, noted Mark Baker, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
“We need to go as fast as possible while remaining safe,” he told reporters during a briefing after the first EAGLE meeting.
The initiative has four pillars — Business Infrastructure, Research and Development, Unleaded Fuel Testing and Qualification, and Regulatory and Policy — with the industry responsible for the first two pillars and the FAA responsible for the last two.
Previous efforts to find an unleaded fuel, including the FAA’s 10-year-old Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative (PAFI), have not been in vain, according to Lawrence.
In fact, he calls PAFI — which will become part of the EAGLE initiative — a success.
“If it’s such a great success, then where’s the unleaded fuel?” he asked with a smile during the briefing.
The success, he said, is in the lessons learned from PAFI that will help lead to an unleaded avgas that works for all 200,000 piston aircraft in the nation’s fleet.
The goal is a drop-in replacement, rather than a piece-by-piece process, such as through Supplemental Type Certificates, he added. Many fuels have already been analyzed and lessons learned from those analyses will go towards finding the new fuel, he noted.
Also participating in the new efforts are the folks behind the unleaded fuels at Swift Fuels, which is available at a limited number of airports, and General Aviation Modifications Inc. (GAMI), which received an STC for its unleaded fuel for some Lycoming engines in the summer of 2021.
Why is it taking so long to find an unleaded fuel for piston aircraft?
Because it is such a complicated issue, Lawrence said, noting that when one solution is found, another problem seems to pop up.
For instance, Lawrence tells of one propeller manufacturer who reported that the vibration levels change when different fuels are used, which affects the life of the propeller.
It’s also critical that the chemicals used in the new fuels are compatible with the general aviation fleet, which has many aircraft that are 50 years or older, while at the same time are not something that the EPA will find fault with down the road.
“I’ve often said that if this was an easy thing to do, it would have been done already,” AOPA’s Baker said.
He noted that the March meeting of the EAGLE initiative is “just the beginning” of the process. He added that everyone involved in EAGLE, from federal regulators to general aviation advocates, want the process to be transparent to all general aviation pilots.
The next meeting of the EAGLE initiative will be held in another few months, Lawrence added.
To find out more about the hunt for unleaded avgas, go to FAA.gov/unleaded.
I take exception to the harsh criticism in these posts toward the FAA. I believe they are a highly competent organization with respect to evaluating new designs and crash investigations. Years ago they incorporated self-certification in the aviation industry for at least two reasons: (1) reliance upon the manufacturers to know their own designs and are therefore most competent to evaluate them, (2) saving tax money to not employ and train a permanent Federal workforce to duplicate factory engineers to such safety evaluations. The underlying premise concerns the pre-supposed critical awareness on behalf of the manufacturers to maintain a good safety record at all costs. However, when that critical safety record awareness is downplayed, the 737 Max tragedies occur. From publicly available news briefs, some execs at Boeing chose to maximize product output at the expense of laborious software evaluation plus downplaying the need to train pilots on the new engine software. The fault lies exactly on the Boeing doorstep for being so short-sighted. They may never fully recover their once-sterling reputation. Thus, the FAA is back in the driver’s seat doing a larger job then they once did when self-certification was commonplace.
By analogy, the FCC delegates certification to radio manufacturers for production of radio equipment for the same reasons noted above. I’ve worked at two radio factories which maintained certified test ranges for new transmitters and receivers to ensure conducted and radiated spurious emissions remain within legal specs. Of course, strict records must be kept and the FCC is empowered to visit a factory at any time to check the records and inspect company test range facilities. Cheaters face serious fines.
There is a pendulum swing operating here. Decades ago, the FDA took years — decades sometimes — to evaluate new drugs before certifying them for market . The public grew impatient and demanded ‘break-throughs’ for vital cancer and other drugs, so the FDA sped-up their testing regime. Result: seeming ‘miracle drugs’ came on the market with unknown dangerous side-effects which would have been discovered had more time been spent of double-blind testing of a large population over years, not months. We’re fortunate — just damned lucky — that no serious fallout has been noted from the several Covid vaccines. Time will tell.
Please give gov’t agencies credit where credit is due. The FCC doesn’t spend a lot of time and resources policing ham radio (my hobby) nor, apparently, does the FAA spend a lot of time and resources policing and updating regs pertaining to General Aviation. Unsatisfied with that state of affairs? Then write your congress person and demand higher taxes and fees to employ additional personnel to conduct the studies to make the changes demanded in the posts above. One man’s opinion, worth what you paid for it.
Regards/J
The EPA is nothing but a fear mongering non legal organization that’s making money from everything it’s connected with!! It was never voted on by the people.. All the piston engines in the world is not worth a spit in the wind. Man cannot change what the SUN DOES or how the EARTH ORBITS THE SUN NOR HOW MUCH TILLT IT HAS FROM TIME TO TIME!!! Every new vehicle you would purchase costs the purchaser in excess of $10,000.00 to make it pass EPA RULES!!!! It is just another organization that needs to be closed down forever. Who do you think is paying the wages—YOU!!!
Unleaded E-FREE auto fuel, both 87 & 91 or above are approved via STC’s in the GA aviation community.
As long as there in non ethanol fuel available, problem solved.
For those aircraft engines requiring 100LL or above, concentration should be directed to those particular engine models.
Making unleaded 87 & 91 E-free fuel available on airports is one of the biggest issues I have seen in the last few years I have flown.
I am aware, having E-free fuel on airports require an additional fuel supply system, I expect they are the same system as used with the higher octane levels currently in use.
Realistic pricing for fuel at the airports is another issue.
Sounds like another over dramatization.. Ironic that my 0-360 is already approved for unleaded since 1970. Automotive change over unleaded in early ’70s was hardened valves, guides and seats.
If 94LL is already here is 100 the problem?
It’s not a search. It’s a chemical research process. You aren’t going to find the solution under a rock over behind the hangar. The FAA has been actively discouraging any forward movement in the process for decades. It’s time for the bureaucrats to take a step back out of the way and actually do their jobs.
Good point on the “search” bit JS. But on the “bureaucrat” on I think you are just repeating a typical politically based line.
I don’t disagree that the FAA can be a pain at times, but for years they have been trying to “step aside”. Look at Basic-Med, Light Sport ASTM based certification, relaxing installation of certain non-TSO avionics in certified airplanes, and accelerated programs to get new airliners up in the air quicker.
And then came the Boeing Max disaster. And guess who was blamed: The FAA for not doing it’s job. So I just think the FAA got burned and is reverting back to having to police all these activities again.
Regarding the 100LL issue Scott is right. there are solutions available that have been around for a long time. For my last homebuilt project I went for a Rotax based engine (no 100LL needed for that one). I couple of years a go a friend asked me if he should buy a low or high compression engine for his project and I recommended low so he could use something other than 100LL. He’s glad now he did. I tried to do a trip in my new Rotax powered homebuilt and made an effort to find airports with “good” alternatives to 100LL. Good luck even though they have been around for a while. At my field they used to sell Mogas but the pump was shutdown a couple of years ago.
We as a country decided to ignore the warning signs that came up many years ago and finally the EPA (and industry) has decided that the only way to save us from our own stupidity is to force us to make the switch (do you think 100LL will last forever?).
Anyway, I am glad that it’s finally happening so I can have an alternative to fuel my airplane up that is not that “not so good for your engine or people” lead gas or the awful smelly corn-full automotive dinosaur juice I have to put in my airplane today. C’mon, even NASCAR and F1 use unleaded fuels, why can’t we? Oh, wait, maybe we need to stop using early 1900’s engine technology? BTW, The FAA is not stopping Rotax from developing advanced engines and seeking certification. Why do Lycoming and Continental whine so much then? I do agree though that the FAA could align itself better with EASA to speed up certification, but first we need stop blaming them for things like the MAX disaster.
Now let the fire begin 🙂
Chris
The majority of piston aircraft engines, with low compression [ about 7:1 ], were certified to use 87 octane gasoline. The high compression and turbo engines require 100 motor octane fuel.
The problem is that most of the engines specify that no alcohol is allowed in the fuel.
I’ve had an stc for mogas since 1970, but it specifies no alcohol. There is no mogas in CA without alcohol so I’m limited to 100LL
I understand that the Rotax 900 series allows 10% ethanol, but it also specifies 95 octane , which, again is not available here in California. 93 octane is the highest.
Then there is the issue of the corrosive affects of ethanol on aluminum -fuel tanks, fuel lines, flexible fuel lines..??
BTW, Nascar engines are new each year and are designed to run on the E15, 95 octane fuel.
“I’ve often said that if this was an easy thing to do, it would have been done already,” AOPA’s Baker said.
Well…there you go.