5 ms·

It's 2021. There is no excuse to be using leaded fuel, just as there was none 10 and 20 years ago. If they don't want to implement reforms, the obvious conseque

It's 2021. There is no excuse to be using leaded fuel, just as there was none 10 and 20 years ago. If they don't want to implement reforms, the obvious consequence needs to be close down any operation still using leaded fuel immediately. You had plenty of time. Leaded fuel is an obvious externality. As with all of those, there is no pressure on the ones causing the immediate harm to stop. Government action is required.

nawgz 5y ago
It is very strange to see this downvoted. It is very inexcusable that after removing lead from virtually every other source due to its intense long term damage, we let people who fly thru the air spew it out in not-insignificant concentrations from the sky!! For such a heavy particle, I can’t imagine a more efficient strategy to distribute it widely than exactly that. It is not good to see the cognitive dissonance needed to downvote someone calling that out just because you like aviation on Hacker News. Maybe on an aviation forum I’d understand but here?
- p_l 5y ago
  The problem is that there's no unleaded fuel that works as full replacement for the low-lead AVGAS, to the point that there are airports where using MOGAS could be considered deliberately inviting disaster. As far as I know, unleaded avgas is quite hot topic in aviation fuel research, but when optimizing for "planes not falling from the air" speed of change can be sometimes slow. Personally, I can't wait for when we get unleaded replacements for all leaded fuels and can just ban leaded.
  - imoverclocked 5y ago
    That’s only a problem because of the extremely old engine designs which we still use because of the expensive certification process for existing aircraft and new engine designs. We can design much better engines in just about every metric… and we do, just not for relatively cheap and certified GA aircraft. We actually do have 100LL alternatives and have had them but the missing piece has largely been certification of those fuels or even just carrying mogas for planes that are able to burn it.
    - p_l 5y ago
      That's why it's great to see numbers like "70% of GA fleet piston powerplants will be now certified to use unleaded fuel".
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        Balanced by “airplanes with those powerplants purchase about 20% of the avgas fuel used in a year”.
        p_l 5y ago
        True. But it's a considerable step forward, and some of those engines provide shorter pathways for certifying sibling models, probably.
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
    It’s been decades at this point. If we can’t find unleaded fuels that work safely for these engine designs, the correct thing to do at this point is to ban the engines.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      Then you quite literally kill general aviation, and a lot of smaller scale commercial aviation, because there are no other engines approved for the airframes. If that's your goal, fine, but don't pretend it's anything else.
      - throwaway472927 5y ago
        Announce it for the future, clearly some alternatives already exist, some more engines get certified, some don't and owners move to those that are. Ultimately it's a question of money i.e. how badly people want it.
        p_l 5y ago
        tl;dr ban GA outside of very wealthy
        adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        what? people with private planes are the ones running leaded currently. people who aren't very wealthy are flying on commercial planes that haven't used leaded gas for decades.
        sokoloff 5y ago
        Wealthy individuals’ airplanes are already burning Jet-A in turbine engines. Who’s piloting the airliners that the not very wealthy are flying on? Working pilots. In what type of airplane did they train? Piston engine aircraft. Now that they need to have 1500 hours experience before taking the yoke of a commercial airliner in the US, where will they get that time? Overwhelmingly in piston-engine aircraft. Typically as a flight instructor, which will go to near zero if you kill the ability of practical intermediate distance travel to be done by high-compression and/or turbocharged light aircraft. (Alaska and Caribbean islands also has a lot of very much not rich people flying around in or getting necessary supplies delivered by 100 octane needing airplanes.) Commercial operations using 100LL dwarf personal plane operations using 100LL. Cape Air burns way more avgas on a Tuesday in July than I burn in a year. Back to “Very wealthy” individuals running turbines. If I could afford it, I would be too. It’s a better engine solution (almost) all around, except the operating costs are a low single-digit multiple higher and capital costs around 10x, which puts it out of reach of almost every individual. No one should cry for me here, but there’s a huge subset of 100LL-based operations that you probably approve of or judge essential and want to continue.
  - nawgz 5y ago
    Yes, everything you say is exactly why government action on this would've been appropriate as suggested by the comment I originally defended. Thousands of people and organizations across aviation benefit in terms of retaining the ability to fly more cheaply. This is true across existing infrastructure, vehicles, engines, manufacturing, certification, etc.. Accordingly, it is clear that the industry will not change; "an object at rest"... Instead, because of government inaction on the topic, presumably because of aviation's ties with the military and wealthy folk in general, these thousands of people and organizations retain their benefit at the expense of everyone else. They simply spray poison from the air in a manner which seems, again, one of the most efficient ways to contaminate the environment with this poison. It is clearly not beneficial to anyone except those in the ingroup, which is a vast minority. Why would government action to force this stale industry be inappropriate?
    - p_l 5y ago
      Except it's not that there was government inaction. The very article discussed is FAA making the rounds to cover 70% of powerplants used in general aviation, which isn't just joyriding for wealthy people (and military doesn't give a damn, cause they aren't bound by those limits). The actually wealthy people don't care either, because they can afford turbine engines. In fact despite somewhat higher price at source for G100UL, there's considerable possibility it will lead to cheaper operation thanks to lower maintenance impact compared with leaded fuel, and GAMI is hopeful about it being rated for full power usage even in place of other, even rarer fuels. There are various problems with just banning GA, no matter how wealthy suburbs would love to do it. From impacting training pipeline, to all kinds of operations that would be involved that you might not think of (whether it's connecting random communities in Alaska, where some cargo is still flown on WW2-vintage DC3s, to medical transports).
      - nawgz 5y ago
        > Except it's not that there was government inaction. The very article discussed is FAA making the rounds to cover 70% of powerplants ... In the year 2021, over 50 years after the automotive industry had already invented engines which could run on unleaded fuels. I'm sorry, but this is an almost farcical point, "it's not government inaction it's just 50 years late!" > In fact despite somewhat higher price at source for G100UL, there's considerable possibility it will lead to cheaper operation thanks to lower maintenance impact compared with leaded fue Great, so the government could've forced industry's hand 50 years ago and the industry would probably be running for cheaper right now. This doubly shows the importance of government action on the topic - it would've been better for literally everyone in and out of aviation if the switch had been mandated. How about that for a story of inefficient markets? > There are various problems with just banning GA I work in aerospace, do not condescend to me on the topic. The point is that 50 years of inaction results in cases where, like in East San Jose, "2.5 percent of children under 6 years old who were tested had detectable levels of lead in their blood"[0]. "GA" clearly could and should have dealt with the issue of poisoning the masses for their own ends, and the fact you would defend them and the government for not stepping in in such circumstances makes you a fool. [0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-was-phased-out-25-years-ago-why-are-n1264970 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
  - yrro 5y ago
    If planes cannot fly safely on unleaded gas then they should not be flying at all.
- biofox 5y ago
  [flagged]
- VLM 5y ago
  > after removing lead from virtually every other source Not even remotely the case. Removed from new paint sales, with measurable positive results in the population. Removed from motorgas for car use, with measurable positive results in the population. That's it. The other remaining uses, of which there are many, seem in infinite studies to show no measurable effect on the population, so its going to be difficult to remove them then show a measurable improvement. The money is better spent elsewhere, somewhere with more bang for the buck than measurably provably zero.
lutorm 5y ago
It's pretty funny to argue that "government action is required" when pretty much the reason that aviation piston engines largely are still based on designs from the 50s is precisely that the government will not let you use anything else. In order to sell an assembled aircraft, with very few exceptions, it needs to be certified by the FAA, and convincing them to allow you to sell a new engine is sufficiently complicated and expensive that the very small airplane market does not make it worth it. (The total number of piston aircraft sold in 2020 was 1300. The best-selling aircraft, the Cessna 172, sold in the 200s.) The only development of new piston aircraft engines are for experimental aircraft, where no FAA approval is needed. In that market you find electronically controlled engines with the same features as automobile engines, and not requiring leaded gas. But those airplanes cannot be sold except as kits. Even engines that need 100-octane gas would benefit from unleaded fuel, because the lead deposits are very bad, forces the use of inferior, non-synthetic oil, makes valves stick, fouls spark plugs, and is generally nasty. Believe me, no one wants to use leaded gas if they can avoid it.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  The FAA and the EPA have conflicting missions here. Unfortunately the public is more scared off death by air crash than death by pollution, even though air pollution is a bigger killer. This means if there’s a conflict, the FAA is probably going to win over the EPA.
  - yrro 5y ago
    The EPA should ban unleaded fuel immediately regardless. Make the FDA choose between lobbying to have the ban overturned (against public opinion I would hope) or unblocking the development of better engines.
    - yrro 5y ago
      s/FDA/FAA/ darn TLAs
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  And as a result most small aircraft engines are naturally aspirated and have carburetors, even though turbo/super charging and fuel injection make even more sense in airplanes than they do in cars because of constant ambient pressure changes. It's hard to find a car with a carburetor these days; fuel injection is ubiquitous and cheap. Not so in airplanes. You can actually find fuel injected and/or turbo airplane engines but they're priced as if they're made of gold, so they're strictly for rich pilots. GA aircraft electronics are quite modern. But GA engines use 70-year-old technology. It's ridiculous.
RNCTX 5y ago
The FAA is the hindrance, not anyone flying or selling the airplanes. If you want to talk to the FAA about an engineering approval you're looking at a 6 month lead time before you get an appointment for a meeting. If you are looking to compete with someone who has a similar approval for a similar thing, you can expect them to cancel the first meeting or two inexplicably and stretch it out to a year, maybe two, because you haven't paid the FAA's brother in law engineering firm to keep competitors out, the other guy you're trying to compete with paid them. All the while you pay your fixed costs, salaries, etc out of pocket. Whatever you bring to the meeting won't be good enough, they'll send you back to change something at least once, even if you copy and paste someone else who has done an identical thing for a marginally different application. If you run the gauntlet you'll get an approval to make your thing for ONE make/model of airplane. Want to put it on a Piper instead of a Cessna with the exact same engine? Go back to square one, repeat. This all became the norm when? IP was extended to aircraft modifications, during the Clinton admin when the internet took off. So you see, it isn't aviation that slowed aviation to an innovative standstill. The tech world's ideas of IP ideas did that. Prior to the advent of IP in aircraft paperwork, it was pretty common to be able to come up with an idea, sketch it out by hand, fly over to the local FAA office, demo it to an FAA engineer on the ramp, and have him help you go forward with it to get it approved. IP took away the motivation to innovate and created a motivation to fight back and forth with lawyers instead. You know... like tech corporations do with software patents.
- dTal 5y ago
  > If you are looking to compete with someone who has a similar approval for a similar thing, you can expect them to cancel the first meeting or two inexplicably and stretch it out to a year, maybe two, because you haven't paid the FAA's brother in law engineering firm to keep competitors out, the other guy you're trying to compete with paid them. This is a shocking level of corruption you're describing.
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    I've been through it personally. I had an airplane until 2018 that optionally shipped with a rather unique air conditioning system. Rather than the compressor being engine powered like most other cars and small piston engined airplanes, there was a second alternator on the engine used to drive an electric motor which in turn powered the compressor. This was all done mostly for weight distribution. The design of the airplane was somewhat nose heavy because the factory added a turbo system with a cast-iron manifold. So they moved the A/C system to the tail with the electric motor for power, and put it all on a shelf behind the baggage compartment in the back. Since the airplane was built in the mid 1990s the factory is out of business, they went bankrupt in the early 2000s. The supplier of the electric A/C system components is still in business but they only deal with helicopters now, they don't have anyone left at the company who knows about the airplane units they used to make. Only about 50 of the make/model of airplane with the turbocharger option were built, so there's no motivation to keep them going for anyone else who might make parts. The market is too small. I found an aftermarket A/C system very similar to the one the factory built in the 1990s and with the maker of that system went to the FAA to get approval for it. The aftermarket system is actually simpler electrically. Rather than two alternators with a relay system it uses one of the largest alternators you can buy, on all of the airplane's existing electrical circuit. You just have to beef up the battery cables and the circuit breaker on the alternator to handle the extra amperage. It took us 6 months and ultimately a suggestion that we have a particular engineering firm look at our plans. They were basically requiring us to re-approve the entire system, even though the system is approved in other airplanes with identical engines. All we needed approval for was a larger alternator (minimal change to weight/balance) and the repurposing of a material made by Boeing for the rear shelf (we told them we intended to use the floorboard material that Boeing puts in 737s, it's a fiberglass sheet reinforced internally with an aluminum honeycomb mesh, that can bear about twice the weight per square inch that we needed to put on it). They made us have that engineering firm submit stress and load test data on the shelf material that Boeing already uses for the 737. The only reason we jumped through all the hoops was the fact that the aftermarket A/C system's installer has a relative that was a 30 year Embraer engineer. He would just help us do the drawings and calculus for free as long as his son's maintenance shop was going to get the installation job. Absent that, the ~$25,000 job would've been a $50,000 job, which just isn't worth it for an airplane that's worth less than $175,000 to start with. When we were willing to turn over the copyright of the plans to the engineering firm we were suggested to hire to "review" the data for the requested approval, including them copying and pasting Boeing's stress and load test data for the floor material Boeing already uses, suddenly the floodgates opened and everyone was happy. The paper was all signed and we got permission to put a marginally different air conditioner in one make and model of airplane (of which only 50 exist in the wild). From initial sales call to cool air in my airplane: about 8 months. The time to install it for two guys was about a week of shop time. After all, they put it in dozens of other makes/models and it's all the same stuff. ---------- If you want another example, you can go down the rabbit hole of a local (to me) company called Navworx, which was aggressively pursued and ultimately closed by the FAA, because the FAA changed the ADS-B spec rendering their ADS-B receiver worthless, after the spec had been in the field for about 3 or 4 years. The ADS-B system has a "sleep mechanism" on the network, in which a data relay tower for a particular air traffic control sector will turn itself off if no ADS-B equipped airplanes are in its service area. The initial spec allowed a generic ID to report its presence in the sector and wake up the tower. After Navworx had been making ADS-B receivers for old non-GPS equipped airplanes for about 3 - 4 years, the FAA pulled the rug out from under them by changing the spec and requiring any airplane requesting that the relay tower "wake up" have an FAA approved GPS unit installed. The initial spec only required an approved GPS for send + receive units, not receive-only units. After changing the spec with existing units already in the field, Dallas FSDO then promptly ordered Navworx to cease and desist manufacturing their previously approved ADS-B receive-only unit for older airplanes. In effect, people who had a traffic display in an old airplane (an obvious safety benefit) were ordered to take their traffic display out and throw it away, and go back to flying without a traffic display unless they were willing to pay $10,000 for a GPS. It just so happens that the Dallas FSDO was also the FAA office that approved Garmin's ADS-B boxes (which were technically inferior and more costly than Navworx's ADS-B boxes on initial release), and at the time Garmin was the only aftermarket supplier of approved GPS units. There was another maker of standalone ADS-B receivers with integral GPS units also in the Dallas area dealing with the Dallas FSDO, which was sold to a private equity fund that buys DoD / CIA / NSA contractors. I leave it to you to ask yourself whether all these facts are relevant to who the FAA decided to close down and who the FAA decided to protect the market of... ------- This business model of the FAA guaranteeing the work for legal and engineering consultants in pervasive across the entire spectrum of things they license. Wanna buy a King Air 350 and charter it to dentists going to Aspen for the weekend when you're not flying it to lower the ownership cost? You have to hire an aviation specialized attorney and probably another consultant or two (read: someone who will sell you their paperwork) to represent you as the FAA goes through a manual review of your standard operating procedures (pilots, training, maintenance, the whole shebang) just like you were the first air charter service to ever buy a King Air 350 in the world. It doesn't matter if you are literally copying and pasting another charter license approval for an identical airplane. Someone from the FAA office demands to physically show up at your hangar and look over the paper, pretend like he's never seen it all before, order a few changes, and then maybe approve or deny your request for a charter operator license after the second visit.

nawgz 5y ago

It is very strange to see this downvoted. It is very inexcusable that after removing lead from virtually every other source due to its intense long term damage, we let people who fly thru the air spew it out in not-insignificant concentrations from the sky!! For such a heavy particle, I can’t imagine a more efficient strategy to distribute it widely than exactly that. It is not good to see the cognitive dissonance needed to downvote someone calling that out just because you like aviation on Hacker News. Maybe on an aviation forum I’d understand but here?

p_l 5y ago
The problem is that there's no unleaded fuel that works as full replacement for the low-lead AVGAS, to the point that there are airports where using MOGAS could be considered deliberately inviting disaster. As far as I know, unleaded avgas is quite hot topic in aviation fuel research, but when optimizing for "planes not falling from the air" speed of change can be sometimes slow. Personally, I can't wait for when we get unleaded replacements for all leaded fuels and can just ban leaded.
- imoverclocked 5y ago
  That’s only a problem because of the extremely old engine designs which we still use because of the expensive certification process for existing aircraft and new engine designs. We can design much better engines in just about every metric… and we do, just not for relatively cheap and certified GA aircraft. We actually do have 100LL alternatives and have had them but the missing piece has largely been certification of those fuels or even just carrying mogas for planes that are able to burn it.
  - p_l 5y ago
    That's why it's great to see numbers like "70% of GA fleet piston powerplants will be now certified to use unleaded fuel".
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Balanced by “airplanes with those powerplants purchase about 20% of the avgas fuel used in a year”.
      - p_l 5y ago
        True. But it's a considerable step forward, and some of those engines provide shorter pathways for certifying sibling models, probably.
- dodobirdlord 5y ago
  It’s been decades at this point. If we can’t find unleaded fuels that work safely for these engine designs, the correct thing to do at this point is to ban the engines.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Then you quite literally kill general aviation, and a lot of smaller scale commercial aviation, because there are no other engines approved for the airframes. If that's your goal, fine, but don't pretend it's anything else.
    - throwaway472927 5y ago
      Announce it for the future, clearly some alternatives already exist, some more engines get certified, some don't and owners move to those that are. Ultimately it's a question of money i.e. how badly people want it.
      - p_l 5y ago
        tl;dr ban GA outside of very wealthy
        adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        what? people with private planes are the ones running leaded currently. people who aren't very wealthy are flying on commercial planes that haven't used leaded gas for decades.
        sokoloff 5y ago
        Wealthy individuals’ airplanes are already burning Jet-A in turbine engines. Who’s piloting the airliners that the not very wealthy are flying on? Working pilots. In what type of airplane did they train? Piston engine aircraft. Now that they need to have 1500 hours experience before taking the yoke of a commercial airliner in the US, where will they get that time? Overwhelmingly in piston-engine aircraft. Typically as a flight instructor, which will go to near zero if you kill the ability of practical intermediate distance travel to be done by high-compression and/or turbocharged light aircraft. (Alaska and Caribbean islands also has a lot of very much not rich people flying around in or getting necessary supplies delivered by 100 octane needing airplanes.) Commercial operations using 100LL dwarf personal plane operations using 100LL. Cape Air burns way more avgas on a Tuesday in July than I burn in a year. Back to “Very wealthy” individuals running turbines. If I could afford it, I would be too. It’s a better engine solution (almost) all around, except the operating costs are a low single-digit multiple higher and capital costs around 10x, which puts it out of reach of almost every individual. No one should cry for me here, but there’s a huge subset of 100LL-based operations that you probably approve of or judge essential and want to continue.
- nawgz 5y ago
  Yes, everything you say is exactly why government action on this would've been appropriate as suggested by the comment I originally defended. Thousands of people and organizations across aviation benefit in terms of retaining the ability to fly more cheaply. This is true across existing infrastructure, vehicles, engines, manufacturing, certification, etc.. Accordingly, it is clear that the industry will not change; "an object at rest"... Instead, because of government inaction on the topic, presumably because of aviation's ties with the military and wealthy folk in general, these thousands of people and organizations retain their benefit at the expense of everyone else. They simply spray poison from the air in a manner which seems, again, one of the most efficient ways to contaminate the environment with this poison. It is clearly not beneficial to anyone except those in the ingroup, which is a vast minority. Why would government action to force this stale industry be inappropriate?
  - p_l 5y ago
    Except it's not that there was government inaction. The very article discussed is FAA making the rounds to cover 70% of powerplants used in general aviation, which isn't just joyriding for wealthy people (and military doesn't give a damn, cause they aren't bound by those limits). The actually wealthy people don't care either, because they can afford turbine engines. In fact despite somewhat higher price at source for G100UL, there's considerable possibility it will lead to cheaper operation thanks to lower maintenance impact compared with leaded fuel, and GAMI is hopeful about it being rated for full power usage even in place of other, even rarer fuels. There are various problems with just banning GA, no matter how wealthy suburbs would love to do it. From impacting training pipeline, to all kinds of operations that would be involved that you might not think of (whether it's connecting random communities in Alaska, where some cargo is still flown on WW2-vintage DC3s, to medical transports).
    - nawgz 5y ago
      > Except it's not that there was government inaction. The very article discussed is FAA making the rounds to cover 70% of powerplants ... In the year 2021, over 50 years after the automotive industry had already invented engines which could run on unleaded fuels. I'm sorry, but this is an almost farcical point, "it's not government inaction it's just 50 years late!" > In fact despite somewhat higher price at source for G100UL, there's considerable possibility it will lead to cheaper operation thanks to lower maintenance impact compared with leaded fue Great, so the government could've forced industry's hand 50 years ago and the industry would probably be running for cheaper right now. This doubly shows the importance of government action on the topic - it would've been better for literally everyone in and out of aviation if the switch had been mandated. How about that for a story of inefficient markets? > There are various problems with just banning GA I work in aerospace, do not condescend to me on the topic. The point is that 50 years of inaction results in cases where, like in East San Jose, "2.5 percent of children under 6 years old who were tested had detectable levels of lead in their blood"[0]. "GA" clearly could and should have dealt with the issue of poisoning the masses for their own ends, and the fact you would defend them and the government for not stepping in in such circumstances makes you a fool. [0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-was-phased-out-25-years-ago-why-are-n1264970 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
- yrro 5y ago
  If planes cannot fly safely on unleaded gas then they should not be flying at all.
biofox 5y ago
[flagged]
VLM 5y ago
> after removing lead from virtually every other source Not even remotely the case. Removed from new paint sales, with measurable positive results in the population. Removed from motorgas for car use, with measurable positive results in the population. That's it. The other remaining uses, of which there are many, seem in infinite studies to show no measurable effect on the population, so its going to be difficult to remove them then show a measurable improvement. The money is better spent elsewhere, somewhere with more bang for the buck than measurably provably zero.

lutorm 5y ago

It's pretty funny to argue that "government action is required" when pretty much the reason that aviation piston engines largely are still based on designs from the 50s is precisely that the government will not let you use anything else. In order to sell an assembled aircraft, with very few exceptions, it needs to be certified by the FAA, and convincing them to allow you to sell a new engine is sufficiently complicated and expensive that the very small airplane market does not make it worth it. (The total number of piston aircraft sold in 2020 was 1300. The best-selling aircraft, the Cessna 172, sold in the 200s.) The only development of new piston aircraft engines are for experimental aircraft, where no FAA approval is needed. In that market you find electronically controlled engines with the same features as automobile engines, and not requiring leaded gas. But those airplanes cannot be sold except as kits. Even engines that need 100-octane gas would benefit from unleaded fuel, because the lead deposits are very bad, forces the use of inferior, non-synthetic oil, makes valves stick, fouls spark plugs, and is generally nasty. Believe me, no one wants to use leaded gas if they can avoid it.

jdavis703 5y ago
The FAA and the EPA have conflicting missions here. Unfortunately the public is more scared off death by air crash than death by pollution, even though air pollution is a bigger killer. This means if there’s a conflict, the FAA is probably going to win over the EPA.
- yrro 5y ago
  The EPA should ban unleaded fuel immediately regardless. Make the FDA choose between lobbying to have the ban overturned (against public opinion I would hope) or unblocking the development of better engines.
  - yrro 5y ago
    s/FDA/FAA/ darn TLAs
dreamcompiler 5y ago
And as a result most small aircraft engines are naturally aspirated and have carburetors, even though turbo/super charging and fuel injection make even more sense in airplanes than they do in cars because of constant ambient pressure changes. It's hard to find a car with a carburetor these days; fuel injection is ubiquitous and cheap. Not so in airplanes. You can actually find fuel injected and/or turbo airplane engines but they're priced as if they're made of gold, so they're strictly for rich pilots. GA aircraft electronics are quite modern. But GA engines use 70-year-old technology. It's ridiculous.

RNCTX 5y ago

The FAA is the hindrance, not anyone flying or selling the airplanes. If you want to talk to the FAA about an engineering approval you're looking at a 6 month lead time before you get an appointment for a meeting. If you are looking to compete with someone who has a similar approval for a similar thing, you can expect them to cancel the first meeting or two inexplicably and stretch it out to a year, maybe two, because you haven't paid the FAA's brother in law engineering firm to keep competitors out, the other guy you're trying to compete with paid them. All the while you pay your fixed costs, salaries, etc out of pocket. Whatever you bring to the meeting won't be good enough, they'll send you back to change something at least once, even if you copy and paste someone else who has done an identical thing for a marginally different application. If you run the gauntlet you'll get an approval to make your thing for ONE make/model of airplane. Want to put it on a Piper instead of a Cessna with the exact same engine? Go back to square one, repeat. This all became the norm when? IP was extended to aircraft modifications, during the Clinton admin when the internet took off. So you see, it isn't aviation that slowed aviation to an innovative standstill. The tech world's ideas of IP ideas did that. Prior to the advent of IP in aircraft paperwork, it was pretty common to be able to come up with an idea, sketch it out by hand, fly over to the local FAA office, demo it to an FAA engineer on the ramp, and have him help you go forward with it to get it approved. IP took away the motivation to innovate and created a motivation to fight back and forth with lawyers instead. You know... like tech corporations do with software patents.

dTal 5y ago
> If you are looking to compete with someone who has a similar approval for a similar thing, you can expect them to cancel the first meeting or two inexplicably and stretch it out to a year, maybe two, because you haven't paid the FAA's brother in law engineering firm to keep competitors out, the other guy you're trying to compete with paid them. This is a shocking level of corruption you're describing.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  I've been through it personally. I had an airplane until 2018 that optionally shipped with a rather unique air conditioning system. Rather than the compressor being engine powered like most other cars and small piston engined airplanes, there was a second alternator on the engine used to drive an electric motor which in turn powered the compressor. This was all done mostly for weight distribution. The design of the airplane was somewhat nose heavy because the factory added a turbo system with a cast-iron manifold. So they moved the A/C system to the tail with the electric motor for power, and put it all on a shelf behind the baggage compartment in the back. Since the airplane was built in the mid 1990s the factory is out of business, they went bankrupt in the early 2000s. The supplier of the electric A/C system components is still in business but they only deal with helicopters now, they don't have anyone left at the company who knows about the airplane units they used to make. Only about 50 of the make/model of airplane with the turbocharger option were built, so there's no motivation to keep them going for anyone else who might make parts. The market is too small. I found an aftermarket A/C system very similar to the one the factory built in the 1990s and with the maker of that system went to the FAA to get approval for it. The aftermarket system is actually simpler electrically. Rather than two alternators with a relay system it uses one of the largest alternators you can buy, on all of the airplane's existing electrical circuit. You just have to beef up the battery cables and the circuit breaker on the alternator to handle the extra amperage. It took us 6 months and ultimately a suggestion that we have a particular engineering firm look at our plans. They were basically requiring us to re-approve the entire system, even though the system is approved in other airplanes with identical engines. All we needed approval for was a larger alternator (minimal change to weight/balance) and the repurposing of a material made by Boeing for the rear shelf (we told them we intended to use the floorboard material that Boeing puts in 737s, it's a fiberglass sheet reinforced internally with an aluminum honeycomb mesh, that can bear about twice the weight per square inch that we needed to put on it). They made us have that engineering firm submit stress and load test data on the shelf material that Boeing already uses for the 737. The only reason we jumped through all the hoops was the fact that the aftermarket A/C system's installer has a relative that was a 30 year Embraer engineer. He would just help us do the drawings and calculus for free as long as his son's maintenance shop was going to get the installation job. Absent that, the ~$25,000 job would've been a $50,000 job, which just isn't worth it for an airplane that's worth less than $175,000 to start with. When we were willing to turn over the copyright of the plans to the engineering firm we were suggested to hire to "review" the data for the requested approval, including them copying and pasting Boeing's stress and load test data for the floor material Boeing already uses, suddenly the floodgates opened and everyone was happy. The paper was all signed and we got permission to put a marginally different air conditioner in one make and model of airplane (of which only 50 exist in the wild). From initial sales call to cool air in my airplane: about 8 months. The time to install it for two guys was about a week of shop time. After all, they put it in dozens of other makes/models and it's all the same stuff. ---------- If you want another example, you can go down the rabbit hole of a local (to me) company called Navworx, which was aggressively pursued and ultimately closed by the FAA, because the FAA changed the ADS-B spec rendering their ADS-B receiver worthless, after the spec had been in the field for about 3 or 4 years. The ADS-B system has a "sleep mechanism" on the network, in which a data relay tower for a particular air traffic control sector will turn itself off if no ADS-B equipped airplanes are in its service area. The initial spec allowed a generic ID to report its presence in the sector and wake up the tower. After Navworx had been making ADS-B receivers for old non-GPS equipped airplanes for about 3 - 4 years, the FAA pulled the rug out from under them by changing the spec and requiring any airplane requesting that the relay tower "wake up" have an FAA approved GPS unit installed. The initial spec only required an approved GPS for send + receive units, not receive-only units. After changing the spec with existing units already in the field, Dallas FSDO then promptly ordered Navworx to cease and desist manufacturing their previously approved ADS-B receive-only unit for older airplanes. In effect, people who had a traffic display in an old airplane (an obvious safety benefit) were ordered to take their traffic display out and throw it away, and go back to flying without a traffic display unless they were willing to pay $10,000 for a GPS. It just so happens that the Dallas FSDO was also the FAA office that approved Garmin's ADS-B boxes (which were technically inferior and more costly than Navworx's ADS-B boxes on initial release), and at the time Garmin was the only aftermarket supplier of approved GPS units. There was another maker of standalone ADS-B receivers with integral GPS units also in the Dallas area dealing with the Dallas FSDO, which was sold to a private equity fund that buys DoD / CIA / NSA contractors. I leave it to you to ask yourself whether all these facts are relevant to who the FAA decided to close down and who the FAA decided to protect the market of... ------- This business model of the FAA guaranteeing the work for legal and engineering consultants in pervasive across the entire spectrum of things they license. Wanna buy a King Air 350 and charter it to dentists going to Aspen for the weekend when you're not flying it to lower the ownership cost? You have to hire an aviation specialized attorney and probably another consultant or two (read: someone who will sell you their paperwork) to represent you as the FAA goes through a manual review of your standard operating procedures (pilots, training, maintenance, the whole shebang) just like you were the first air charter service to ever buy a King Air 350 in the world. It doesn't matter if you are literally copying and pasting another charter license approval for an identical airplane. Someone from the FAA office demands to physically show up at your hangar and look over the paper, pretend like he's never seen it all before, order a few changes, and then maybe approve or deny your request for a charter operator license after the second visit.