Good to hear that they have a plan B.Swift had an 8 year head start. G100UL got approved less than a year ago. Selling fuel ain't like selling Xboxes. That approval was also unexpected and quite a surprise to everyone involved, aside from Lirio Liu (FAA director of ACS). And it's not like G100UL is totally blocked. Apparently, they're on to plan B.
View attachment 119653
Speaking for myself, I'm concerned about the risks to GA of 100LL suddenly becoming unavailable. The ONE tetraethyl-lead plant in the world represents a single point of failure, and there is also the political risk that it could suddenly be prohibited, as has already happened in at least one jurisdiction.
Yes. Letting your mower, airplane, or anything else sit for six months with old gas in it is probably not a good idea. If you don't do that, your chances of a good outcome are greater.
Does Sta-Bil help with the ethanol problems?
Nope.
Plan C is to have the tetraethyl lead-production facility have a mysterious fire which ushers in the immediate production of GAMI 100UL, lol.
In my extensive experience with cleaning motorcycle carbs due to modern auto fuel (I own 9 operable motorcycles) I've found that it takes between 1 and 2 months before you are likely to have problems with clogged pilot jets. Something to bear in mind with those Rotax engines having Bing motorcycle carbs.
Been running straight pump gas (presumably E-10) for 13 years in my Rotax / Bing equipped ride.
We don’t run AVGAS because it reduces the oil change interval my 75%, and dramatically shortens the life of the gearbox (or so we’re told). We do have 91 octane ethanol-free, which is what we use in the plane for the most part. It gets an occasional tank of 100LL or even E10. It all burns.
Yeah, fill up your 50 gallon tanks doing it this way 1 gallon at a time. lol
If you can live with the reduced octane rating.
Exactly! It’s not like 10% ethanol is just a cheaper filler. It can be added to a lower octane naphtha cut, one that may be less reformed and thus less costly, to bring octane rating back up where it needs to be for sale as a road motor fuel. Pull ethanol out and you have a lower octane rating fuel that’s potentially catastrophically damaging to the bottom end of the engine…but your fuel system will be happy, lol. That’s the simple explanation.
You'll get most of the ethanol out, along with a significant amount of toluene and xylenes also used to increase the octane. Water alone can hold about half a gram of toluene at room temperature, but the ethanol that goes into the water will also carry a significant amount of those aromatic compounds too.
I just buy the E0 now at any of the 4 closest stations for all that stuff. Even easier!
I run avgas in my snow blower. I like not having to worry about whether it will start due to bad gas.
So that's way before my time. Is the current Philips XC 20W50 the same? If so, what happened to the STC requirement?
In general, the consensous standard was tweaked and the engine TC holders approved the oil so no other approval needed. When the original 20W50 was released Lycoming and TCM had other problems and didnt approve the oil at that time. So an STC was the only route. In reality, its the engine TC holders that have control over the oil and fuels that go into their engines.
The OEMs certainly have a big knob to turn... but as we've seen, the STC route (or other approvals, given the FAA's latest vagueness) offer an alternative.
More recently, Swift's 94UL has been added by Cessna, Lycoming, and Continental to their service information on acceptable fuels. And at least Textron is slowly modifying their type certificates to indicate the originally approved fuel or other fuel as provided in their service literature... making TCDS revisions unnecessary.
The current crop of unleadeds aren't close to falling within D910, and ASTM has said there will be no attempt to include them... they'll have their own specs. Even Swift's 94UL has its own ASTM spec IIRC. D910 has no provisions for ETBE, MMT, methanol, heavy aromatics, aromatic amines, or any of the other special things that the four still-at-work developers are bringing forward. The ASTM committee members forsee problems trying to backward integrate those provisions with the existing 100LL approvals. It does raise the question of fungibility of the new unleaded 100s with each other, and the FAA hasn't proposed a solution for that yet. I guess it might make sense to see if more than one fuel emerges... but that's kind of playing brinksmanship with an important property we've assumed forever.
Well, if he's making light beer with that Mr. Beer kit he might have a chance.
