As the process to transition general aviation from 100LL to an unleaded fuel has dragged on, communities around the country are seeing an opportunity.
“A lot of communities are using this issue to close airports, pure and simple,” said Pete Bunce, president and CEO of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) during the association’s annual State of the Industry event Feb. 22, 2023.
He pointed specifically to Reid-Hillview Airport of Santa Clara County (KRHV) in San Jose, California, which banned the sale of 100LL in January 2022.
“They’ve been trying to close Reid-Hillview for years and years,” he said. “And when they couldn’t do it on noise, they tried to starve the airport. And unfortunately we’ve got other communities around the country that are trying to do the same.”
He notes that a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the FAA and Santa Clara County has produced a model that encourages other communities to do this before general aviation “is ready to transition to unleaded fuel.”
“We’re fully committed to transition to unleaded fuel by 2030, but that MOU is so full of holes it doesn’t have any teeth to it,” he continued.
The MOU, signed by Santa Clara County and the FAA Feb. 7, 2023, suspends an ongoing FAA investigation into alleged grant violations at the county’s two GA airports, KRHV and San Martin Airport (E16), while issuing an invitation for the airports to participate in a project to study best practices for transitioning airports nationwide to unleaded aviation fuel.
The project will study airports around the country in various stages of transition to unleaded aviation fuel “to better understand how airports can implement the change in a safe and efficient manner,” according to FAA officials.
Conducted by the Airport Cooperative Research Program, sponsored by the FAA and managed by the Transportation Research Board, the project will “provide an overview of the challenges and opportunities for airports and identify best practices, guidelines, and tools to help individual airports across the nation effect the transition” to unleaded fuel, according to Santa Clara County officials.
It is expected to begin in 2023, but there’s a chance that Santa Clara County won’t even participate in the project.
“Once the scope of the demonstration project and the county’s obligations are known, the county will decide whether to accept this invitation,” county officials said.
The MOU has no accountability for the county or its airports as far as unleaded fuel is concerned, Bunce noted.
“The MOU says ‘well, you’re going to maintain it and you’re going to invest in it’… yeah, right, watch,” he said, showing a bit of anger. “There’s no accountability in there and, oh by the way, they don’t want to take any more money from the federal government so they are just going to run the clock on like we’ve seen at so many other airfields out there.”
Bunce is referring to grant assurances required by the FAA. When an airport accepts money from the FAA, it agrees to continue operating as an airport for a certain number of years, often decades.
Bunce added the strategy the FAA is using with the MOU is “flawed from the start.”
He added this strategy is “not part of EAGLE.”
“There is a disconnect between what they’ve done on the MOU side and what we’re trying to do very cooperatively with great people not only at the FAA, but also at the EPA.”
EAGLE — Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions — is an initiative that launched at the 2022 State of the Industry event.
Bunce reported that during its first year, EAGLE has had “incredible support” from the FAA to build the “four pillars” of the initiative: Business Infrastructure, Research and Development, Unleaded Fuel Testing and Qualification, and Regulatory and Policy.
“This is a highly complex problem,” he said
He noted there are now two pathways to finding replacements for 100LL: The Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative (PAFI) path and the Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) path.
Two fuels are now on the PAFI path, an unleaded fuel from Afton Chemical/Phillips 66 and one from Lyondellbassell/ VP Racing.
A fuel developed by General Aviation Modifications Inc., G100UL, has received an STC for all piston engines in the FAA’s database, while another company, Swift Fuels, is in the STC process.
Bunce notes that developing the fuels is just the beginning. The companies then need to find oil companies to produce the fuel and then a distribution network must be created to get the new fuels to the airports.
GAMI officials, who are now negotiating with oil companies to license the unleaded fuel, have said that KRHV and E16 will be among the first airports to receive the new fuel.
If the FAA would back down from their goldylocks mentality, requiring unleaded fuel to be exactly the same as 100LL when it comes to fuel burn and mixture ratio, we could have had UL fuel years ago.
Reid-Hillview is a special case since the vote on the Board of Supervisors is led and controlled by a lady named Cindy Chavez. Mrs Chaves is hell bent to close KRHV and I don’t know why. She claims that they would like to build affordable housing there, but it puzzles me since the East area of San Jose is already the most affordable housing anywhere in the Bay area.
This is a political football, and it seems that the feds lack the guts to protect necessary infrastructure like a reliever airport. KRHV is the only airport, other than the San Jose International Airport, in the area, and when there is an emergency KRHV is pressed into action for support by the emergency services. The concept of closing this airport is bewildering to me since it is critical to safety and support. In the meantime it is used for GA training and activity.
There is vacant nearby for Mrs. Chavez to build her affordable housing so her defiance of using that land in favor of closing KRHV shows that she simply wants to close the airport.
I attended a call in to the Supervisors and the messages were:
a) the planes are belching lead over the community, killing our children
b) single mothers begging for “affordable housing” — meaning “Free” housing
The callers were obviously agitated into calling by social media. Some organization lined up all of these people since the messages were the same …. “give me free stuff”.
The county hired a consultant to perform a study, and he relied upon a Belgium study where a correlation was found where an increase in lead in the environment led to a corresponding decrease in IQ levels in children. The consultant took lead samples around a three mile radius KRHV and found lead in consistent levels everywhere and that was assumed to be from automotive leaded fuel usage from decades ago. He did get a hit downwind from the KRHC run up area, however, and Cindy Chavez seized on that.
Closing airports is unwise since they provide employment and local investment. Meigs was a good example because many head offices were located in Downtown offices and executive could travel out of Meigs to visit clients and factories. After Meigs closed the reports of office vacancies due to companies leaving were numerous.
Here’s pretty much ALL you need to know about the United Nations Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 sustainability programmes and the World Economic Forum who is pushing the agenda by the likes of Klaus Schwab: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/03/04/whitney-webb-globalist-overlords-meeting-davos.aspx
If the greenies at the EPA and the NGO’s who are peddling and influencing the banning of 100LL fuel were the least bit honest, they’d first address the burning of JET-A and its detrimental effects in the upper atmosphere by large airliners and private jets… but they won’t and never will.
It’s time we all say “HELL NO”! to the UN, WEF, EPA, NGO’s and other assorted greenies pushing for the elimination of General Aviaion 100LL fuels!
I don’t understand the headline to this story: “… unleaded fuel solution drags on” seems to imply that no solution has been found.
I agree that we should continue to develop _additional_ solutions, but is there some shortcoming to G100UL that I haven’t heard about?
Contrary to popular belief, there are NO “great people” at the EPA – and agency without ANY Constitutional authority for its formation in the first instance. Plus, those greenies at the EPA march to a different constitution and set of by-laws FAR REMOVED from the United States of America – with the worldwide Communist Organization called the United Nations – based on ceded soil by the Rockefellers in New York City with its own Headquarters District. Moreover, the United Nations and its environmental sustainability programmes are all based on AGENDA 21 and AGENDA 2030 – which hardly anyone has read. Better get started! The UN is methodically taking over the reigns of government thru treaties and MOU’s through its communist network of NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations). Wake up now, or GA and everything you hold dear is going to be mowed down.
I’m visiting South Australia, and it is so encouraging to see that Mogas is available without ethanol. It is a fantastic change, since I live in California. The flying community also has freedoms to build hangars that we can only dream about in the US.
It is very hard to feel any sympathy with these airports. Most are government-owned and controlled by woke-indoctrinated, techno-ignoramus bureaucrats. Over a decade ago a grassroots efforts from GA pilots (I was one of them) helped dozens of airports get Mogas onto their airports, despite the collective opposition from nearly all aviation alphabets, Avgas producers and Avgas distributors. Now their chickens are coming home to roost. I was just in Germany and Switzerland visiting with pilot friends. What do you know – nearly all GA airfields, even the small ones, have Mogas among the fuel options, and it is delivered by the same fuel suppliers that bring Avgas and Jet-A. Much of their piston fleet has transitioned to Mogas and Jet-A burning pistons. We are so far behind in this country, the fault being government and the aviation alphabets “leading from behind”.
Not to mention Washington State SB 1554 that while it doesn’t directly ban the sale of leaded fuel at airports in the state, it definitely makes it more difficult to do so. It also has the added enticement that an airport is exempt from all the rules if they don’t provide leaded fuel. So, while not an outright ban, it will have the same effect in many places.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1554&Year=2023&Initiative=false