5 ms·
Nope. Not piston engines anyway. Airplane engines have to be much more reliable than car engines in a much harsher environment, and until today leaded fuel was
by dreamcompiler 4y ago
Nope. Not piston engines anyway. Airplane engines have to be much more reliable than car engines in a much harsher environment, and until today leaded fuel was the only solution that produced the requisite level of reliability.
- lbriner 4y agoThanks. This was the question I was looking to answer, "if we did it in cars seemingly easily, why not planes!)
- doliveira 4y agoWas it easy, though? We already knew it was a bad idea to start with, and yet it took almost a century to phase it out.
- sokoloff 4y agoIt was introduced into auto fuel in 1921 and phased out in autos in the US from 1976 to 1996 (with the phase out being heavily front-loaded).
- doliveira 4y agoI would count from the very introduction, because everyone knew from the start it was a bad idea but profits spoke louder.
- dreamcompiler 4y agoIt's always been trivially easy to replace lead in car gas if you don't care about cost. There are a thousand chemicals that will increase octane levels and prevent knocking, and some of them can be bought at your local hardware store. But none of them were as cheap as tetraethyl lead in the early 20th century, so TEL won. (This argument doesn't apply to avgas, where TEL did/does more than just prevent knocking.)
- doliveira 4y agoI know that, and if monetary cost is the only thing you're measuring it's a perfectly good explanation and it's totally worth it to knowingly poison people for that.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoWhat do they run 2-strokes on in the US then?
- FourHand451 4y agoOil/gasoline mixture. No requirement that there needs to be lead in the gas, as far as I've ever heard.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoWell, I know it's got oil mixed in. Presumably the leaded fuel requirement is only for four-strokes though, since two-strokes can't run on leaded?
- jabl 4y agoIt's kind of an orthogonal issue. Oil is needed in the fuel for two-strokers with crankcase ventilation for lubrication. Lead is needed to boost octane. But your old outboard engine is most likely a very simple low compression engine that doesn't need particularly high octane, so can run just fine on regular car gasoline (preferably without ethanol, but again a slightly different issue) mixed with the two-stroke lubricating oil.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI know how they work, I'm just wondering if 2-stroke aero engines get a pass from using leaded fuel since they run for about ten minutes before the lead fouls the plug.
- jabl 4y ago> 2-stroke aero engines Which 2-stroke aero engines are you thinking of? > get a pass from using leaded fuel since they run for about ten minutes before the lead fouls the plug Huh? Before unleaded automotive gasoline became the norm, all kinds of 2-stroke engines ran on leaded gasoline just fine.
- doliveira 4y agoThat was also the argument for putting lead in fuel for cars in the first place. The answer just seems "not enough political pressure to phase it out".
- skimo8 4y agoThats true, but aircraft engines also run harder, must be lighter, and more reliable. It has been discussed elsewhere, and is a technically harder problem. On top of that, general aviation makes up a much smaller part of the population motoring around every day, so probably less of a priority to gain political traction (until now). That being said, I’m very happy to see an unleaded standard. It was my understanding that 100LL was not able to be transported via pipeline, which was part of the contribution to its higher cost.