Millions of lives and $Ts in health damage has been done and continues to be done by lead[0]. And it was largely avoidable because the dangers were known.
99 years ago the League of Nations signed a treaty banning indoor leaded paint. The US, of course, declined to join and it took another 50 years before it took action. Concerns were raised about leaded gasoline, industry steamrolled the science.
And it was just a couple of months ago that the final country (Algeria) stopped producing leaded consumer road fuel.
As many as 500,000 US children (2.5%) under 6 years have BLLs ≥5 µg/dL. Each lead-exposed child costs an estimated $5600 in medical and special educational services.7 Lead exposure-related cognitive impairments cost an estimated $50.9 billion annually in lost US economic productivity.6
a) Leaded aviation fuel, an absolutely KNOWN hazard, has been given a pass for literal DECADES.
b) At some point you have to just put your foot down. Ban the sale leaded gas using planes after 1/1/2022. Grandfather in the old planes.
c) Ban the sale of leaded gas to fill planes with changes in registrations after 1/1/2023.
d) Ban the sale of leaded gas period after 1/1/2025.
Industry has been given (more) than enough time to solve this - and does not care.
I live near an airport, with a pregnant wife and a young child. The total hassle it is to deal with just old lead paint if you try and follow code is rediculous, but they still have planes flying over burning LEADED fuel!! WHY?
Most planes don't need leaded gas. Jet-A / Diesel etc can also be used in planes. And yes, I understand small, old GA planes may be impacted, but this has been on the radar for decades now.
"There is no known safe blood lead concentration; even blood lead concentrations as low as 5 µg/dL may be associated with decreased intelligence in children, behavioural difficulties and learning problems. As lead exposure increases, the range and severity of symptoms and effects also increase."
Most planes don't need leaded gas. Jet-A / Diesel etc can also be used in planes. And yes, I understand small, old GA planes may be impacted, but this has been on the radar for decades now.
This comment makes me think you don't actually understand the situation. The vast majority of aviation fuel used IS Jet-A, which does not contain lead.
Small piston engine general aviation aircraft are the only ones that use leaded gas, and most of those can not use anything else that exists currently.
I too have a pregnant wife and a young child, but I worry far, far more about residual lead paint exposure than I do about avgas. Both get tested regularly and show no detectable levels (<2ug/dL), so that makes me feel like the risk exposure is acceptable. Yes, your quote about "no known safe level" is true, but at undetectable levels I'm confident it's in the noise along with all other environmental factors we don't know about.
If you're worried about lead exposure, are you testing?
There has been no push in the market to get small GA off leaded gas. There has been no extra tax even. As a result, new planes, being delivered today, are shipping with engines requiring leaded gas, which perpetuates this problem.
After decades - does it make public policy sense to still sell NEW planes that REQUIRE leaded gas?
I don't believe so.
Literally every other method of propulsion, some with much stronger claims in terms of life utility, have moved off leaded gas. Ie, the ambulance, the race cars the everything, except GA.
Reality -> GA has a well connected / rich pool of users with influence. If you had a bunch of poor minorities spraying even trace amounts of lead over someone's nice golf course my guess is you'd be getting well off activists to shut you down in no time for environmental or other reasons.
On the contrary, there's now several unleaded options coming to market and now available at certain FBOs. UL94 seems to work well in continental and lycoming power plants that power most Cessna 1XX aircraft. The issue has largely been building the distribution network.
To my knowledge some ultralights use regular unleaded (called MOGAS in some aviation contexts) and of course anything that you can buy an airline ticket for outside of perhaps Alaska will use jet fuel.
I'm very happy with the recent progress in GA Avgas. My flying club recently switched from 100LL [1] to UL94 [2] with no appreciable change in aircraft performance.
I think he is talking about GA 100L fuel.
Which, as someone stated elsewhere, I think absolutely should be changed to 94UL across the board.
I don't believe there is no possible way a small single prop GA plane simply cant run on unleaded gas. That seems eerily close to propaganda from Midgley himself. Some performance alteration without some small changes to the plane? Maybe.
But cataosrophic outcomes even with some small changes? Highly unlikely.
Exactly. The idea that you can't make an engine that runs on unleaded is rediculous. Airliners for example don't use leaded.
Yes, planes 50 years ago -> maybe those were designed for leaded. But the idea that we are selling new planes, today, that "only" run on leaded gas is a farce and goes to show how seriously aviation is taking the transition away from leaded gas (which has been delayed as I've said decades).
> b) At some point you have to just put your foot down. Ban the sale leaded gas using planes after 1/1/2022. Grandfather in the old planes.
A measure like this may be reasonable.
But C/D totals the entire piston aircraft fleet-- $50B+ of capital equip, plus the whole infrastructure and industry around it-- for only a very moderate change in lead exposure. Best estimates I've seen is that this would lower the total population burden from lead by well under 5%.
Much more sane, IMO, to put in a progressively escalating tax on leaded aviation fuels that over time becomes steep. Then airplanes can gradually transition as overhauls become due, etc, as the pressure from operating costs mounts. Presumably those burning the most fuel would transition first, and an industry capable of retrofitting a few percent of the aircraft per year would spring up.
Except they can't, since there is no approved alternative.
The other problem is that even planes that can run unleaded gas often don't, because it's not available at the airport. Avgas is a tiny market and because of costs most FBOs can't or won't set up another fuel delivery infrastructure to run two fuels over some short transition period.
Because of this, an additional requirement on a replacement is also that it be safely mixable with 100LL in any ratio, because during the transition period this will happen as people fly from airports where it exists to airports where it doesn't.
> Except they can't, since there is no approved alternative.
There's an increasing number of diesel engines for GA aircraft, and supplemental type certificates to retrofit them into the same. If 100LL got more expensive, you'd see more people opting for the diesels when an engine reaches the end of its life.
Yes, it'd be really cool to end up with a lower-lead fuel that's safely combined with 100LL. That's been "imminent" for the last 25 years.
The poster above advocates for a "rip off the band-aid" approach. GA advocates for a gradual, painless transition that, in practice, will never happen. Surely there's some middle ground?
Continental diesels still have "TBR" (time between replacements) instead of "TBO" (time between overhauls). That's a huge problem preventing their uptake.
Data seems to imply that the diesel engine lifecycle cost is slightly better now than conventional engines, so electing for a diesel replacement instead of a conventional engine overhaul can make sense... but it's a razor thin difference.
If you made leaded fuels more expensive-- more airfields are going to want to move to UL94, and more people at overhaul time are going to go the diesel path, and the problem will gradually get better.
Well, plus the fact that a new aviation engine runs $30-60k, which is about what an old, small, airplane is worth. It just doesn't make economic sense to replace those engines, you're effectively just trashing those planes.
Fair enough, but that's not a replacement for 100LL since not all engines can use it. It's gotta be a pretty large FBO to have enough market to pay for setting up a distribution for UL94 in addition to 100 octane gas. Like, there are engines that were certificated to run on 80/87 avgas but no one sells that any more either. Today's avgas market just isn't large enough to make it worth offering two fuels.
About 2/3rds of GA has an STC available to burn it.
There's not going to be one single tidy drop-in solution for the entire market. That's why we should tax leaded fuels, and everyone can pick the appropriate solution for them. Some will pick diesel conversions. Some airfields will go 94UL and people will purchase STCs. Presumably some other people will take other paths. And those with the hardest time transitioning can instead pay the tax and burn leaded fuel, still.
It's not absolutely a sure thing that there's any significant burden from aviation. Blood tests come up with a tiny, barely detectable difference near airports (well under 5% for those nearest the airport, and confounded: airports are correlated with low SES and therefore lead paint, etc, is also more prevalent). The most pessimistic estimates from first principles come up with 2-3% of the total population lead burden (more than an order of magnitude above what the blood tests imply, and the blood tests likely overstate the problem).
If you threw a few billion more at leaded paint remediation, I think you'd make much more of a difference. I think the aviation lead problem should get fixed, but because it's such a small part of the overall problem it makes sense to take a graduated approach instead of giving GA businesses the death penalty. Tax leaded aviation fuels, and use the proceeds to pay for leaded paint remediation.
Graduated approach ignores the decades that have ALREADY been provided as an exception to the lead fuel rules that apply everywhere else - it's already been graduated.
Start at 10% with a commitment to ratchet it up by 4% per year or something. That's enough to start an immediate reduction without destroying the industry.
If you're making choices about engine overhaul now for an overhaul that will last you 7-8 years of light use, fuel costing 40% more at the end of that overhaul will definitely get your attention.
> it's already been graduated.
Doing nothing for decades when it was impossible; and then doing nothing for a decade or two when transition became possible; and then pushing the industry off the cliff is not graduated.
Source please. All the studies I've read have barely detected higher levels of lead near airports, and are confounded. All the estimates from first principles estimate that it's a very small proportion of population lead exposure, too.
I was a child in a major city when leaded gasoline was prevalent and I live by an airport now. I probably see as many propeller airplanes in a year as I did automobiles in 5 minutes as a child playing in the street. This is also comparing an airplane off in the distance to a car running a few dozen feet away. So perhaps your recommended ban wouldn't move the needle at all when it comes to blood lead concentrations.
Or perhaps this is the benefit of having younger people in government. Because 50 year old like me thinks "massive progress made, don't waste time on diminishing returns" by comparing the current situation to the distant past. Whereas someone younger sees the threat differently.
Frankly, the propellor airplanes I do see are mostly military which will likely not be impacted by any regulations. I am also making the assumption only propellor airplanes could be using unleaded gas.
Damn, it makes so much sense that aviation fuel is leaded. I have been a fortunately healthy person for my life, but at one point I lived downtown San Jose (which for the non-locals has an airport in the middle of the city), right under the main landing/takeoff path. I got sick 6x a year or more. After 1 and 2/3 years, I realized that it was probably the planes and moved away, and now I haven't been sick since except maybe once or twice (over 3y).
Large airplanes/jets do not use leaded fuels. Only small piston planes. Even right under the takeoff path, aviation lead exposure would only be a moderate proportion of your total lead exposure.
While it's unlikely that you had significant lead exposure due to this as others have pointed out, I also wouldn't discount your issues with getting sick more often, particularly if it was upper respiratory illnesses - people who live under airport flight paths are exposed to up to 4x as much harmful exhaust gas byproducts, superfine particulates, and other nasty particles* vs baseline.
It's amazing that airports aren't required to purchase and relocate the (typically poor) people who are absolutely getting their lifespans shortened by living near an airport.
Most airports, at the time there were built were located in a relatively remote area. The city typically moves closer to the airport, not the other way around. It would require an unreasonable amount of foresight to buy out all this (at the time quite empty) land ahead of time.
It's unlikely to have been a direct cause given the (relatively) low levels of lead avgas generates, but it almost certainly has some effect.
The question is, given that it's so clearly a poison (maybe a top 10 poison) - why spray it into the air above residential neighborhood?
Lead impacts are around things like "anaemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioural effects of lead are believed to be irreversible."
Reality is measurable increases in lead concentrations in blood near airports is very small. But does look like it exists.
Only piston engined planes used any fuel with lead, virtually no commercially operated flights use piston engines (sightseeing and bush pilots aside), so the vast majority, basically 95% of traffic in the skies is already using Jet-A, which does not contain lead.
Wait until you read up on Toxicologic Assessment of Jet Fuel which covers mostly JP-8, the military stuff, but it is also used in trucks, because they can! Or Toxicologic Profile of Jet Fuel which also covers the civil stuff, Jet A.
A chief tool used by industry to deceive was to cast doubt on independent science and scientists. A popular book on misuse of statistical methods, one that I'd read and liked myself, How to Lie With Statistics, turns out to have been part of that effort, as detailed by Tim Harford in his own book, How To Make The World Add Up
The ultimate cautionary tale here is Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic, How to Lie With Statistics. Huff’s book is clever, insightful, and impish, and it may be the best-selling book about statistics ever written. It is also, from cover to cover, a warning that statistics are all about misinformation, and that one should no more believe in them than in stage magic. Huff ended up testifying at a Senate hearing that the evidence linking smoking and cancer was as spurious as the evidence linking storks and babies. His unpublished sequel, How to Lie With Smoking Statistics, was paid for by a tobacco-lobby group.
People are very well aware that the war over what is truth and real continues to be fought. And that it is not merely corporations engaged in it, as control over truth and perception is at the heart of power. "All warfare is based on deception."
As a hint, if one side has a long record of lies, and another a long record of honest relations and owning their errors --- the smart money takes counsel from the second. It's wise to assess one's own sources on this basis from time to time.
I don't really understand your argument. Are you trying to say that "How to Lie with Statistics" is wrong? That's an unbelievably bold assertion to make on an engineering-focused site where we regularly work with deceptive stats that the public eats up.
It is deceptive and misleading with an intent to promote specific goals and agenda.
The salient characteristic of propaganda is not that it is (entirely) false. It is that it serves a specific interest and agenda rather than being a good-faith, best-effort attempt to convey truth.
It's a fundamental conflict in communications dating at least to Plato and the philosophers vs. the sophists.
Propaganda is most effective when it wraps its intended payload in an attractive, largely truthful message, and acts to nudge its intended targets in a direction they're inclined to go already.
There are various methods. Control is one. The Big Lie another, direct attacks on trust and truth another. Sheer overlwhelming and distraction as well.
You don't? It's crystal clear to me: that book was paid for, as was its sequel, so industrialists could argue that statistics from independent researchers were not to be trusted. Whether or not the book was right or wrong is not part of that contention.
It was specifically paid for and used to cast widespread doubt on smoking leading to lung cancer. It tried to convince people that "the science isn't settled" when the evidence was overwhelming.
It's an incredibly disingenuous and cynical piece of work that posits truth does not really exist b/c all "experts" are just lying to you with an agenda. Therefore, you can't ever really know the truth, therefore keep smoking.
I think that's taking things a little too far. How I see it, Darrell Huff was a writer, not an academic, and he wrote a number of books over the years about all sorts of stuff.
I presume he got a bee in his bonnet about statistics at some point, and wrote his 'How to lie with Statistics' and because this became such a hit, it was assumed he know what he was talking about, and hence the interest from the cigarette manufacturers, the senate etc. This in fact was a mistake, and his credentials for appearing for the senate should have been checked.
So, the key take away from the book for me is that Statistics is hard, it's easy to confuse yourself or produce dubious results, but i'd look elsewhere for information about how to avoid pitfalls, and how to spot dubious conclusions beyond the most simplistic manipulation he points out.
Even worse, now we have the actual anti-science narrative where, say, the Big Evil Climate Lobby is making up global warming in the hopes of getting more grant money while your friendly neighborhood petrochem megacorporation is just trying to make do and provide jobs and petrol in your tank.
It's genuinely hard to know how to make sense of information. I'm generally skeptical of "big anything", whether that's business or government. Incentives can be screwy at any scale, but once you get to very large numbers, incentives seem to simply go off the rails. Industry and governments have a pretty terrible track record of skewing data to suit their needs-- sometimes with a truly tragic consequences.
That's why my initial stance on COVID vaccines was to be skeptical of the industry claims. This lumped me in with a lot of quacks, and with a political (US) group with whom that I don't normally align much.
It's been a strange few years. At this point, I'm not sure I know how to strike a balance between healthy skepticism and paranoia. Regarding the vaccines, I'm fully vaccinated, as enough time has passed to get me to a place where I think the stats bear it out.
I don’t know if it is really that incentives change when you get very big, as much as it is that you become more capable of achieving desires that are counter to the public good.
At smaller scales, your power isn’t enough to override the preferences of the masses. Get big enough, and you can.
While not impossible, it’s much harder to create false stats when going through clinical review with the FDA. Super double extra when the lives of the world are at stake and the total eyeballs on a single vaccine are so high.
But the processes are very flawed leading to the wrong stats being used to make decisions.
For example, an experimental vaccine isn't given out widely till there is good data that it is safe (often taking years).
However, for risky diseases (like COVID), as soon as there are even rough indications that it is safer than COVID, it makes sense to give it to everyone. Every month you spend doing more safety tests, millions of people die.
The same is happening right now for malaria treatments which are being trialled. Skipping the trial and handing it out untested will probably save more lives.
> For example, an experimental vaccine isn't given out widely till there is good data that it is safe (often taking years).
How is this an example of “the wrong stats being used to make decisions”? You believe that undergoing safety trials with control groups is a bad thing because they take time?
> However, for risky diseases (like COVID), as soon as there are even rough indications that it is safer than COVID, it makes sense to give it to everyone.
What if we find out several years down the road that the vaccine is causing a drop in IQ, affecting birth rates, etc.? Wouldn’t it have been nice to catch these things during the safety trials before injecting it into billions of people?
> You believe that undergoing safety trials with control groups is a bad thing because they take time?
You can always do more trials and more studies, but at some point the cost of delays outweighs the risks. A blanket "this is the degree of safety testing needed" for every single intervention makes no sense if the cost of that testing differs significantly — and when you have a rapidly spreading disease killing millions of people, the cost of delays is much higher than it would be if you're trying to cure the common cold.
No testing at all would be a really bad idea, but "we'll spend just as long testing this one as this as we would on a common cold vaccine" is also a really bad idea.
I'd also drive faster if I were rushing to the hospital with a dying friend, even though speeding is risky. You have to weigh risks and benefits and do what has the best expected outcome.
> What if we find out several years down the road that the vaccine is causing a drop in IQ, affecting birth rates, etc.?
What if we find out several years down the road that COVID-19 does these things? We have a better grasp on the potential side effects of the vaccine—which, after all, is much simpler than a virus—than we have on the potential side effects of the disease.
Covid is a relatively known relatively high risk which has killed millions and left tens of millions injured.
A vaccine may cause problems. Possibly. Or it could also not cause problems.
So far there is no evidence to suggest that problems are particularly likely, or that they have been happening at all at significant risk levels.
The rational decision - clearly - is to deal with a severe immediate threat. Not to worry about something that shows no signs of happening because what if maybe perhaps could happen y'know.
The US in particular seems to be full of either such naive types (where enterprise, state, science, NGOs, law, etc can do no wrong, and even if something happens, it's just some individual bad apples at worst) or the other extreme (pizzagate-aliens-they're coming for us conspiracy nuts).
We've know much longer than that. From around 20 BC
"Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them" - Virtuvius VIII.6.10-11
And yet we still have people making the "but the science on climate change wasn't and still isn't absolutely definitive" defense of Michael Crichton in a different thread yesterday.
Climate change denialism is the lead poisoning denialism of the modern era. You can actually see the denialism happening in real-time with actual posters here on HN, this is the same way it worked back then, this is how people delude themselves into thinking they're making a scholarly defense of "facts and the scientific process" when in reality they're just buying into industry propaganda designed to play on that instinct.
Nobody need wonder how it might have happened, it's happening right before your own eyes in these very threads.
> Each lead-exposed child costs an estimated $5600 in medical and special educational services.7 Lead exposure-related cognitive impairments cost an estimated $50.9 billion annually in lost US economic productivity
Yes - the quantification of the problem helps with comprehension but also opens the door for balancing trade offs in a manner we'd likely find distasteful. If the lead industry generated 60 billion of completely new money I'd still be in favor of outlawing it even if it was a net loss for the economy - since general quality of life is lowered by lead poisoning (especially since it has been linked strongly to anger issues).
I don't see it as disturbing, just focused. This phrasing helps to put the problem into perspective from one particular point of view—the cost in economic productivity. It does not imply that this is the only cost, or that there aren't other equally valid perspectives to consider.
we have a similar issue going on now with hormone disrupters in basically in most hygienic products (shampoo, body wash), containers, beauty products. it's causing a lot of issues and there are studies showing this recently, it was connected to sudden deaths each year. we need an overhaul. if this was a bug or a glitch in some software it would have been fixed in a few weeks
In the US avgas (which has similar lead content to pre-phaseout automotive gasoline) is 0.14% of gasoline usage and declining at about 5%/year.
Fuel supplied lead is a 99.86% solved problem which is solving itself.
Congress has been funding a program to develop lead free fuel which can safely power aviation piston engines, it is ongoing. Intermediate results are largely not available because it is required to protect all commercial entities participating. https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/
There is a big fight over Avgas going on in San Jose over Reid Hillview airport.
Yes, while total use of leaded fuel now makes up a tiny percentage, it is still measurably significant to the people who live in the flight path of a municipal airport.
They are using that as an excuse to close the airport since that's in an area where real state is highly valued. Reid Hillview is a 'relief' airport - that means it is used to shift small GA traffic away from San Jose airport.
Those aircraft will not disappear, they will just move to SJC a few miles away and pollute just as much.
I seriously doubt that, if the lead was removed overnight, they would change their minds and stop complaining about the airport. This NIMBY fight is older than that.
I feel similarly about my HOA who complains about noise pollution from SJC. The airport predates the houses by decades but now it is suddenly a problem.
There should be far more outrage about lead in avgas than there is today - maybe then the FAA and EPA would stop bickering and issue some new regulation. Noone wants to take responsibility for the monetary damage and possible disasters stemming from the decision to phase out lead, so decades later we are still looking for the perfect avgas replacement.
Meanwhile, European planes are transitioning to other fuels. Either Jet-A or motor gas. Diamond has developed great engines, but when their aircraft are sold in the US, guess which engines they use? People will ask specifically for lead burning Lycoming or Continental. If there was a penalty for doing that, maybe this would change.
Diamond has not developed great engines. There's a video floating around of them quite literally taking stock Mercedes taxi diesels apart and putting different oil coolers on them.
The only difference in design besides those oil coolers was their gearbox, which was a joke from day one. Firstly, diesel produces RPMs similar to what a small aircraft propeller wants so even having a gearbox is either a revenue-generating design intended to fail, or an exercise in stupidity. You can tell me which, I honestly don't know.
Nor has Diamond developed great aircraft in other aspects, either. Their stick rather than a yoke design was also a cost-cutter, but no one wants to ride around with a piece of metal hitting them in the balls, either. Socata and Cirrus did a much better job of interior design than Diamond, which is why they're still making ever-more-complex airplanes, and Diamond is flirting with bankruptcy.
The solution to general aviation getting rid of leaded gas is someone to make small turbines, and the only thing holding that back is the FAA.
What the heck. Fully FADEC controlled and reliable engines with automated runup tests, what's not great about them? That the original design was derived from the automotive industry?
I am not qualified to comment on the need of the gearbox. I would suspect that neither are you.
> their stick rather than a yoke design was also a cost-cutter, but no one wants to ride around with a piece of metal hitting them in the balls, either.
The large numbers of people flying RV10s seem to disagree. Diamond doesn't have a monopoly on the center stick. Passengers may not like the floor mounted stick, but pilots? Meh. The passenger stick is removable on the DA42 and 62.
You can't seriously take a Diamond Twinstar and tell me that's not a great aircraft.
> The solution to general aviation getting rid of leaded gas is someone to make small turbines
Right, I can picture it right now, a C172 with a turbine engine. Maintenance and fuel requirements aren't even in the same league, no matter how small this turbine is.
As shown elsewhere in this thread, the lead-free, drop-in replacement has been approved.
> What the heck. Fully FADEC controlled and reliable engines with automated runup tests, what's not great about them?
A run-up is a grand total of 4 inputs even on a gas engine with 2 ignition circuits (power, prop pitch, ignition 1, ignition 2). Automating this is not rocket science, it's a gimmick. Yes, the Diamond diesel is a Mercedes taxi cab diesel with an aftermarket gearbox and oil cooler.
> The large numbers of people flying RV10s seem to disagree.
Experimental aircraft are not an apples/apples comparison to certified aircraft, they are just barely airworthy.
> Right, I can picture it right now, a C172 with a turbine engine. Maintenance and fuel requirements aren't even in the same league, no matter how small this turbine is.
Because of the FAA. The cost to get an appointment with them prices most would-be competitors out of the market. The FAA exists to protect airline and defense contractor monopolies, period.
> What does TSG want for the firewall-forward package it is developing on the RV-10 (come on, I know you want to know)? “We are hoping to offer it for between $168,000 and $175,000 USD.”
From its quoted operating cost of 20-25 gallons per hour that's doable. The last gas piston single I owned held 92 gallons and burned 19 per hour in cruise (a turbo Lycoming 540). Range would be a tradeoff, because of the increased weight of the fuel, but the bigger hindrance is weight and balance mismatches, which brings us full circle to my original point:
The entire industry has been held teetering on the verge of bankruptcy by the FAA for the last 40 years. And by "FAA" I mean their corporate and military "customers" as they refer to them when emails get subpoenaed. No one in their right mind would design new light GA airplanes (Cirrus and Socata included). All of the domestic US manufacturers have either quit or gotten the "Goldman Sachs special" (bought, loaded with debt, intentionally bankrupted, and then sold off to Textron for the meager parts supply chain profits).
Flying machines were a great idea, unfortunately they were invented in a shithole country...
Counterpoint: if we remove the habitat for civil aviation, it will, in fact, disappear. And we should: it's just a nuisance and serves no real purpose. The idea that civil aviators provide disaster relief, as advocated by those who favor keeping Reid-Hillview open, is completely absurd. A single flight of a real aircraft such as a C-5 at SJC would carry more materiel than 1000s of GA operations.
KRHV and GA in general are part of an ecosystem. There is Angel Flight West for instance which is only possible because of small GA aircraft.
A giant aircraft requires a giant amount of fuel, a giant runway and a pilot who has spent a whole lot of hours flying non-commercially. Without GA and small planes, we might also not have sustainable commercial-aviation.
My CFI took off to go work for the airlines because of increased demand several months ago. Without GA he may not have had an opportunity to stay with aviation at all. One can not learn everything needed to fly an aircraft in a simulator.
That airport has 100 octane mogas available now. Pilots from other airports have been flying there to fuel up instead of using the 100LL at their local airport.
When I was doing my research on ULPower engines (which can burn 100LL, but they would prefer non-leaded), there were very few airports who offered unleaded fuel (UL94). I think, San Carlos / KSQL was the only one I found?
I wonder what KRHV closure would mean for unleaded fuel? So everybody would just switch back to 100LL? How is that supposed to help?
Wouldn't be more practical (from the point of lead pollution) to enforce non-leaded fuels in those small airports instead? My cursory research shows that lot (?) of these light planes (and, perhaps, the majority of the trainer/weekend hobby aircrafts) would happily burn non-leaded fuel (UL94, for instance), with corresponding STC.
Can you help us laypersons understand why leaded gas is still needed in GA engines? Is this as simple as using better valve seats or something? I mean cars haven’t needed leaded gas for a long time, why can’t GA aircraft just use modern parts / engines?
Because they were designed for leaded gas and you can't just modify certified aviation stuff without spending millions on the process of getting your modification approved.
I think it's more that most aviation piston engines were originally approved for use with leaded fuel, and things have been slow to change. At least some of them apparently run fine on the right unleaded fuel.
Not an aviation guy, but a car guy. Lead has historically been used to raise the octane rating of gasoline. Octane rating expresses the resistance of the fuel to "knock" which is the sudden explosion of the air-fuel mixture inside the cylinder versus a controlled burn and which can damage the engine. The main factor that raises the octane requirement of an engine is the compression ratio (max cylinder volume to min cylinder volume). High compression ratios generate more horsepower but require higher octane fuel. The other thing is that lead lubricates the valve seats preventing excess wear, but that's a solved problem with hardened valve seats.
The 1970s would be a great leap forward for civil aviation. The widespread aircraft that are only certified to run on leaded fuel are all derivatives of World War 2 designs. The engine of a Cessna 172 has been in continuous production since 1955 and has parts that are interchangeable with engines back to 1939.
It’s not just wealthy people, it’s predominantly student pilots. Wealthy pilots are burning diesel or Jet A in newer luxury planes like the Cirrus Vision.
I've seen this asserted elsewhere, but I'm wondering what evidence exists that flight hours on leaded planes are _predominately_ due to student pilots?
If I were in government, I would tax avgas at $100/gallon this year, $1000/gallon next year, and $10,000/gallon the year after.
Then the super-rich can continue to fly, paying the nation for the economic and health effects they're causing, but regular hobbyists will have to ground their planes till unleaded avgas is available.
Should be easy-ish to enforce, because planes and flight plans are registered, and anyone paying no tax and flying a lot ought to be easy to catch.
'Hobbyists' have been waiting for lead free avgas for decades. You should just crush their planes while you are at it.
While the super rich do whatever they want? By the way, if you are super-rich, you are probably burning Jet-A anyway, not AVGAS.
The real fix is to just issue the damn regulation and provide some incentives. Engines have to be overhauled and replaced periodically anyways. Make it easier to recertify aircraft, provide a path for aircraft that no longer have the original manufacturer around. Give incentives for small airports to stock on whatever the proposed avgas replacement is until the demand catches up.
> flight plans are registered
No they aren't. No requirement for flight plans in VFR.
If you are proposing such harsh legislation, you should at least try to learn something about the subject matter.
Indeed. Electric engines would be outstanding. Cheaper to buy and maintain, no 'turbocharger' shenanigans to fly at high altitudes, more reliable, less noisy.
As a side effect, this would completely destroy the pipeline for commercial aviation (think big jet) pilots. Pretty much everyone starts on small crafts and then proceeds to burn hundreds of hours of avfuel in the process of getting to their commercial licenses. Considering the scale and importance of the aviation sector, as well as the ongoing shortage of trained pilots in the field today, the results of your policy would be catastrophic.
The industry is rapidly trying to move to do two things, 1. remove lead from the fuel, this is noted by other commenters. And 2. Pushing for more electric GA.
Pilots don't exactly like getting their hands covered in lead when they check fuel, much less dumping it into the atmosphere when they fly, but it's still an unfortunate fact of life. Times are absolutely changing though, and the future looks bright.
North America has gotten off easy by pushing the training onto pilots themselves.
If banning leaded gas leads to qualified pilot shortage, the industry only has itself to blame for failing to train the people it needs.
Lufthansa at least (and maybe most big euro flag carriers?) runs its own “ab initio” training, where it takes non-pilots and makes them into pilots with a job.
Not sure if there’s a shortage of skilled pilots today as flight counts are still down like 20% in USA vs 2019, and generally a sharper decline elsewhere.
This is awesome. However, since it appears every certified airplane needs an STC to be able to use it, it doesn't seem likely that I'll be able to use it in our experimental aircraft any time soon. I can't imagine that our small FBO will switch from 100LL to G100UL as long as there are any airplanes around that can't use it.
No. Unleaded aviation fuels have been available forever. That certification helps people convert obsolete aircraft to unleaded at lower cost, a thing which should be a non-goal of national policy. The federal government should outlaw leaded aviation fuels immediately and let the hobby aviation community figure out how to proceed from there.
> Unleaded aviation fuels have been available forever
True. But irrelevant if most aircraft cannot use it.
> That certification helps people convert obsolete aircraft
Obsolete? Is a Cirrus SR-22 obsolete?
> The federal government should outlaw leaded aviation fuels immediately and let the hobby aviation community figure out how to proceed from there.
The government also uses planes. Whole industries use piston planes. And helicopters. Why are you singling out 'hobby' aircraft?
Mind you, experimental aircraft have been able to use unleaded fuels (including automotive gasoline) for a while now. The reason most can't is that there were no fuels certified for use in their aircraft. Certification requirements come from the government, so the government has to fix it.
Small planes are used for much more than hobbyist uses. Prior to G100UL there were no drop in replacements which made adoption of unleaded avgas fuels impractical. G100UL can be manufactured at the existing avgas plants, stored and transported in the existing avgas infrastructure, and even mixed with leaded avgas.
Banning unleaded fuel without a replacement would have been heavy handed and short sighted. The government should be working with industry partners to develop a suitable replacement -- as G100UL was -- and subsidize the fuel costs to make the more expensive replacement the same cost as leaded fuel.
Can you please stop posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments? We tried unbanning you awhile ago, and for the most part it has worked ok, but if you keep this up we're going to have to ban you again.
There's a certain level of bastardhood at which it becomes hard to feel sympathy for someone's demise. I don't know which side of the line Thomas Midgley Jr. is on, but he's reeeaaal close to it.
Do you think he intentionally invented it to harm people? I don't think you can logically position that it is good for a person to die but not those which they indirectly (and likely involuntarily) harmed.
CFCs are a pretty important invention even today and leaded paint and fuel probably seemed like a good idea at the time since no evidence suggested otherwise for a long while after it's introduction and commercialization. Unless he concealed information about known dangers, I think it's illogical to fault him to the point of celebrating his untimely death due to it.
Reminds me of the German that invented pulling nitrogen out of the air to be used in fertilizers, saving hundreds of millions of lives. WW1 rolls around and he invents gas warfare.
This article's understandably very critical of the man but is there much in the way of hard evidence he knew just how dangerous these inventions were and wilfully ignored the risks? Geninely asking, it just feels like the article is a bit of a hatchet job.
Nobody's disputing that his inventions were awful in the long run for humanity and the Earth but it seems a little harsh to criticise someone for lacking the gift of prophecy. As far as I'm aware we only figured out how harmful CFCs were for the environment in the 1970s for example.
"Facing sceptical reporters at a press conference in October 1924, Thomas Midgley dramatically produced a container of tetraethyl lead - the additive in question - and washed his hands in it.
""I'm not taking any chance whatever," Midgley declared. "Nor would I... doing that every day."
"Midgley was - perhaps - being a little disingenuous. He had recently spent several months in Florida, recuperating from lead poisoning." (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40593353)
I believe after that press conference he spent several more months in Europe detoxing. High-concentration exposure was known to be dangerous ("On the Thursday of the week before Midgley's press conference, at a Standard Oil plant in New Jersey, a worker named Ernest Oelgert started hallucinating. By Friday, he was running around the laboratory, screaming in terror. On Saturday, with Oelgert dangerously unhinged, his sister called the police. He was taken to hospital and forcibly restrained. By Sunday, he was dead. Within the week, so were four of his colleagues - and 35 more were in hospital. Only 49 people worked there.") and quite a few people were concerned about long-term, low-level exposures.
There is plenty of evidence that he at least new that TEL was extremely toxic - Midgley himself was poisoned by it. Despite this knowledge, he went on to insist it was safe for the public. As for CFC's, the evidence would suggest he did not know of their effects on atmospheric ozone. My reading of the article left me with the impression that Midgley's work on TEL and subsequent marketing was enough to condemn. His work on CFC's appears to be a very unfortunate follow-up.
You probably meant it as a joke (it was ok) but since half the comments are not:
"The change in IQ scores has been approximately three IQ points per decade. One major implications of this trend is that an average individual alive today would have an IQ of 130 by the standards of 1910, placing them higher than 98% of the population at that time."
Personally few things triggers me as older generations bashing younger, everything since ww2 has been easier the older you where and they where the ones raising that younger generation. Bit of typical not-getting-it.
As much as IQ tests want to say they test raw intelligence, education plays a major role in how well you score. And we are better educated as a society than we were 100 years ago.
When looking at IQ increase over time, you control for education and socioeconomic factors, otherwise you're just drawing conclusions from those factors.
If the world is the most peaceful it's ever been, and people are the smartest they've ever been, what does that mean for land and housing prices in a fiat economy?
For instance, the Internet's digital distractions and supernormal capacities for cognitive offloading seem to create a non‐ideal environment for the refinement of higher cognitive functions in critical periods of children and adolescents’ brain development. Indeed, the first longitudinal studies on this topic have found that adverse attentional effects of digital multi‐tasking are particularly pronounced in early adolescence (even compared to older teens), and that higher frequency of Internet use over 3 years in children is linked with decreased verbal intelligence at follow‐up, along with impeded maturation of both grey and white matter regions.
This paper doesn't mention IQ even once. It just discusses general effects it can have e.g. potential problems with multi-tasking for some, possible beneficial effects via increased mental stimulation for the elderly etc. This is quite different than what you initially proposed, not to mention inconclusive.
What do you think cognitive decline means? IQ tests are also called cognitive assessments and the accurate ones (not the ones you take online) involve a lot of different aspects of assessing how your brain is working. Many psychologists don't like the term IQ because it's too basic of a term...which is why many papers studying the subject do not include it.
But we have small indications (Ramsden 2013, 2016) that too much linoleic acid (an omega-6 fat) could be detrimental. At the same time, canola and corn oil are rich in it and aren't correlated with higher risk of death in big observational studies.
Seed oils are probably not as bad as some fear, given that we don't see increased deaths associated with it in observational studies. But you might as well use olive oil (for more omega-3 fat) instead if you can afford it.
What is IQ? It's a measure that involves different categories. Some of those categories have seen decline for decades while others have seen an increase. Digging deeper can highlight more detail. Sadly, little of this is documented in easy to find places online.
If I were to guess, stress is responsible for a large part of it - stress is already known to have side effects in mental health and life expectancy. I mean... my generation (as someone born in 1991), what did we experience in our formative years? Nothing but a perpetual state of crisis:
- for Americans, the numerous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and in other countries - not to mention 9/11 itself which hit right as many of my generation were in childhood and old enough to understand what is going on in the news
- for the Europeans, the Euro crisis not soon after, same effect if not worse, given the devastation it caused in Southern Europe / PIIGS states
- for Europeans, dealing with the refugees that all the wars in Africa and Asia caused, culminating in the 2015ff migration crisis
- worldwide, anyone not completely ignorant already sees the catastrophic effects of climate change and the utter inaction of our politicians. We see that the world is figuratively speeding with 200 km/h against a rapidly upcoming brick wall, we see that instead of applying the brakes, the 1% of rich and elites instead maxes out the throttle, and we know that we are going to take the beginning of its effects in 30 years and our children face the full impact. Old people complain why the youngest are on strike on Fridays instead of going to school - well, they are aware that no amount of education can help them if the planet is nearing inhabitability!
- and on top of that, we have a new crisis looming in the form of Russia destabilizing Western governments by propaganda and cyberwars, and China taking parts right out of the NSDAP playbook and acting like a schoolyard bully in the Pacific region all the way to Australia.
- did I already mention that my and the later generations will face significantly less earnings than the generation of Boomers, and that income and wealth inequality also has risen constantly over the last decades?
- as a result, home ownership is ever more inachievable, in contrast to our parents we have to regularly be on the move and uproot ourselves (thus, losing our meatspace social network) every couple of years because the only way to achieve wage raises is to move companies
- and on top of all of what I mentioned, we have the aftermath of the Covid crisis that showed just how fundamentally broken our societies and economies are, how incompetent and reckless our politicians are, how utterly ignorant politics and society acted when it came to the needs of the young (we sacrificed our youth for the at-risk population, and got rewarded with anti-vaxxers and police smashing outdoor parties as a thank-you), that wrecked entire economies beyond belief and many of us lost people held dearly under sometimes egregious circumstances!
All of this is a permanent mental load, in some cases (especially when it comes to Covid) we are crossing into trauma territory. I'm seriously interested in the first psychological research dealing with stress influence of the last two decades.
Be thankful you weren't a child during the Reagan years. When I was around 8 years-old, every time I saw jet contrails I was convinced they were incoming USSR ICBMs.
Incoming ICBMs would look very different (something like bright meteors).
Edit: I know, through the eyes of an 8 year old. My city was a target of the U.S. nuclear missiles, so the I had the same fear. Saw nuclear exposions all the time in my dreams.
Do you think, that having been through Cold-war era conditioning and propaganda, that you're sort of sensitized to the "modern Russia tropes"? I ask because, well Russia seems like a shithole. A sort of noncompete on the global scale outside their natural resource stockpiles, but the US demagogues seem to like to point fingers there and I see it as more or less a propaganda tool. I suspect it's aimed at the generations that experienced the cold war, but I'm inducing hard.
I think a lot of people miss the Cold War. There was this far away, monolythic, scary enemy, that can be reliably used to justify any amount of military expenses. And to a certain point it was, of course, since up until 1953 they were expecting a "world revolution".
The situation changed ever so slightly after 1985, culminating in dissolution of USSR. Good riddance!
And now the same forces - or new incarnation of the same forces - are working again to create that image of an absolute enemy - on both sides. It's just so easy.
Thanks, but I don't really think that's the point at all.
The parent commenter relates that they were 8 years old and not a missile identification expert at that age; but stressed about by something that actually was a realistic fear.
Same here. To make matters worse, I used to confuse the tornado sirens in our town for air raid / civil defense sirens when I was very young and I remember being quite afraid of them, even when I knew they were routine tests, until I finally understood the difference.
This is extreme myopia. You could make a list like this for any given 40-year period and in the earlier periods disease would be worse, healthcare would be worse, material living standards would be worse, and life expectancy would be lower.
I think it's basically laughable to suggest that millennials have experienced more stress than earlier generations. (Not that it matters, but I'm an older millennial myself.)
Now, it genuinely might be the case that millennials are subjectively more "stressed out" than their predecessors, but that's a different claim. It's a claim I don't have any trouble believing, but the cause is likely widespread access and attention to negative stressors (via social media, for example), not the existence of a greater number of them.
"they are aware that no amount of education can help them if the planet is nearing inhabitability"
Do you really believe that? That Earth will be uninhabitable within the lifetime of a person alive today? Or their grandchildren? No climate scientists argue anything remotely close to that outcome.
Well, that depends on the human reaction. Think of screaming "fire" in a movie theatre. Panicked rush out, egregious disregard for human life and safety for the sake of self-preservation. Consider our theatre patrons are armed, guns, knives, nuclear weapons, economic warfare. I'm not saying there is necessarily going to be world destruction, but it isn't-not on the menu.
How many climate predictions have been correct? How many predictions in general have, a posteriori been right? This is multivariate, not necessarily a question of the effects of climate itself, but every conceivable effect in a long chain, including further human intervention and non-linearities in global climate behavior that are yet-to-be observed and no doubt a lengthy slew of other factors. But we're not allowed to talk about speculation, right?
This is simply not accurate. There might be certain areas that are more impacted than others, like the Maldives, but there is no reasonable interpretation of "uninhabitable" any scientist would attribute to Africa, let alone Earth entirely.
"places" uninhabitable is not the same as the planet being uninhabitable, as the parent post claimed. Parts of the planet have been uninhabitable for ages.
My mentality seems to be very different from the norm, because none of those things cause me any stress at all.
I think about them from a Policy stand point, I may recycle or by a sustainable product because I know about climate change, but I am not stressed over climate change
I am not stressed over wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, I oppose them from a policy stand point, I am sad and empathetic for the lives lost needlessly.
Even COVID, did not cause me any stress. I looked at the data, I isolated myself when appropriate, wore a mask when appropriate, and got vaccinated when appropriate I did not have an existential crisis of the mind where I was in fear that I was going to die, not at any point in the pandemic. Certainly not to the point where I have seen others be; out on the street screaming @ people that did not conform to societal or government demands or claiming those people are a "threat" to my life.
So I honestly have no frame of reference for people that have this "permanent mental load" where all of these things cause them soo much stress that is impacts their life.
Yes some conservatives have a greater reaction to 9/11, and seem to be more suspectable to external threats / rhetoric like Islamic terrorism, china, russia, etc.
However when it comes to things like the pandemic, or internal threats like domestic terrorism, or "Trump" like presidents, etc liberals seems to become just as unhinged and stressed as the most extreme conservative does over an Islamic Terror event...
If you are not seeing that likely because you are more closely aligned with one group over the other.
I am close to neither, as I am more an individualist and reject any type of collectivism from religion, to government structures, to golf clubs, if it is a group I want no part of it
>Yes some conservatives have a greater reaction to 9/11, and seem to be more suspectable to external threats / rhetoric like Islamic terrorism, china, russia, etc.
So which is it? :)
>If you are not seeing that likely because you are more closely aligned with one group over the other.
Well I'm in the UK which is a completely different world when it comes to politics. Even then I don't really identify with either of the main parties, I could pick issues that I align with from both sides.
>If you are not seeing that likely because you are more closely aligned with one group over the other.
Yet you reacted when I mentioned conservatives.
>I am close to neither, as I am more an individualist and reject any type of collectivism from religion, to government structures
Again it is applicable to both, you asserted it was only conservatives that have this trait, I contend it is both.
>>Well I'm in the UK
I am sorry ;)
>>Yet you reacted when I mentioned conservatives.
No I continued the dialog we are having by responding to your assertion and disagreeing where I felt your argumentation was flawed
>>That sounds fairly conservative to me.
Depends on how you define your politics, if you do so on a single axis Left/Right. Liberal / Conservative. Maybe.
I tend to look at politics more like the Political Compass[1] for which I am dead center between left and right, but I am extremely far down on the libertarian scale
My parents both grew up in poverty in disparate communities and both experienced potential food shortages.
Later in his early twenties my father was drafted. They also spent time doing bomb drills in elementary school because of the cold war, nuclear fallout was an actual worry.
>did I already mention that my and the later generations will face significantly less earnings than the generation of Boomers, and that income and wealth inequality also has risen constantly over the last decades?
I do worry about rising wealth inequality, but that is largely a factor of deficit spending and needing the fed to print money causing wealth transfer to the upper class. Unfortunately, most young people are all for the government spending even more money for various things which will only exacerbate the issue.
>(we sacrificed our youth for the at-risk population),
I dunno, the largest cohort of covid positive cases has always been the 20-30 age group by far.
“Unfortunately, most young people are all for the government spending even more money for various things which will only exacerbate the issue.”
The issue is not the amount of money that is spent; the issue is for what the money is spent. So many articles discussing the current bills in Congress simply stating the amounts of money that are allocated in aggregate with little if any discussion of the specific amounts within the bill. My skeptical mind thinks this is purposely done to mislead the public.
Only the dead have seen the end of war. As far as stress on a populace goes, anyone my age (50) or younger has had it pretty easy. My parents' generation had to deal with the possibility of getting drafted to fight in Vietnam. My grandparents' generation had to deal with the much higher possibility that they were going to have to fight in World War II. A 20 year old trying to get some sleep because in the morning he is going to have to storm the beaches of Normandy, that's some stress. What my generation dealt with, stressful sure, but not as much.
>> the financial crisis
There's always going to be another financial crisis. My grandparents grew up during the Great Depression. The 70s had stagflation. I first learned how to freak out about the stock market in the late 90s. There was the 2008 financial crisis, and after that there was the longest economic expansion in US history. Do people just wipe that part out of their memories? Out of all of it, I would pick anything but the Great Depression.
>> anyone not completely ignorant already sees the catastrophic effects of climate change
When I was young, it was overpopulation, then a coming ice age, then ozone and acid rain, then global warming. If you look at what the scientists are actually predicting, it is that we will be much better off at the end of the century but not as much better off as if we had taken more action now.
>> we have a new crisis looming in the form of Russia destabilizing Western governments by propaganda and cyberwars
When I was a young teen, I seriously believed I would die in a nuclear war before I was 18. Now people are freaking out about Russia trolling people on the internet.
>> did I already mention that my and the later generations will face significantly less earnings than the generation of Boomers
Boomers started in what, 1946? In 1950, one third of the households in the US didn't have indoor plumbing. And you're jealous of them.
>> home ownership is ever more inachievable
The home ownership rate is lower than it was in 2000, higher than it was in 1990, around the same as it was in 1980, and higher than it was in 1970. Rental affordability is a little lower than in the past, mortgage affordability much higher (due to low interest rates). People change jobs less than they used to and they move less than they used to. Not really seeing peak stress here.
Sure, Covid was stressful for some people. Not for me, it's been the least stressful year and a half of my life. I don't see the whole fundamentally broken part. If you had told me that there was going to be a global pandemic that pretty much shut down the US economy for a time, I would have thought it would have turned out worse than it did.
You get downvoted, and I understand why (HN does not like most jokes and for good reasons and so on), but I think that was actually a very appropriate reaction. Anyone having spent time on Facebook knows exactly what, and in what way, you meant that.
if everything is lowering IQs at all time, wouldn't it just be reflected in the mean then? This would imply that IQ tests would have to get easier over time to keep the average at 100.
It does. They are not. Or at least if some factors are lowering it, other factors like better nutrition and deleading etc. are more than counteracting it.
You would still have outliers that raise the mean - mostly children from wealthy people who can afford to raise their children on rural-ish areas, away from environmental pollution (not just lead, but also particulate matter dust/NOx from roads, industrial airborne toxins, and noise).
There aren't enough people so rich that they can live in country estates and remote coastal "summer" residences all year (so, neither parent has a job they need to be at) while sending their kids to rural boarding schools to show up in those stats, I expect. Plus you may have trouble pinning down where they actually live most of the time, even if you tried to account for them.
Beyond that, given rural areas have been subject to over a century of severe brain-drain and intelligence is fairly heritable, I'd expect that to overwhelm any benefits of country living, if you tried to measure the effect for a general rural population. You'd need a twin study or something like that to sort it all out, i.e. a bunch of twins where one grew up in the country, one in the city or 'burbs or whatever you're comparing it to.
Sometimes it's not how smart you are but if you can utilize that. Many people can't afford higher education, especially from rural areas, there's also stereotypes based on accents and mannerisms that could prevent growth at a company. People in rural areas are also farther away from large companies and may be unable/unwilling to move.
Household lead paint is still allowed in much of the world. India only banned* it in 2016(it is still poorly regulated, so still widely used). China the same in 2020.
Note that concentrations matter, that there is a dose-response curve (more lead => greater impacts), and that the quantities of lead in common products such as paint were insane.
Lead wasn't simply some trace component of paint, but was up to half by weight (dried), or 500,000 ppm in the US (and probably comparable if not worse elsewhere:
White house paint contained up to 50% lead before 1955. Federal law lowered the amount of lead allowable in paint to 1% in 1971. In 1977, the Consumer Products Safety Commission limited the lead in most paints to 0.06% (600 ppm by dry weight). Since 2009, the lead allowable in most paints is now 0.009%. Paint for bridges and marine use may contain greater amounts of lead.
Leaded petrol had on the order of 0.5 -- 1 g/l lead, again, not trace amounts, which were discharged directly into the air. Much settled out relatively quickly, within a few hundred metres, as lead is heavy. Still, lead permeated cities and land adjoining roadways and expressways. And still does. Remediation is expensive, natural remediation takes centuries.
At 90 ppm, India's regulations seem to impose a maximum upper bound, and controls for incidental introduction. Given that total elimination is impossible, setting a maximum standard.
When I was a teen, copper and tin were too expensive, and I was a bright, precocious teen sculptor. So picture eleven, twelve year old me melting lead in a crucible, taking the crucible in flaking asbestos gloves and pouring it into my casting form. I was a productive little sculptor, too, making many pieces a year.
Partly though, if I'm remembering correctly, is that no amount of lead is considered 'safe'. Obviously that's very difficult, and many people will be exposed to lead at some point. End goal should be to minimize, and make the ppm as near zero as possible.
Again: it's a matter of quantity, background or other source rates, costs of reduction, measurement capability, and alternative harms, etc.
All quality standards are specified on some acceptable deviation. The goal is to not exceed the standard.
Equipment, water supply, source materials, packaging, extant air containation (if in an area in which, say, leaded fuels remain in use), etc., might all contribute to trace contamination. If you have an interest in the reasoning / conditions, rulemaking hearings and evidence likely refer to this.
I'm not about to dive into this, but if you have a genuine interest, the US regulation is in 16 CFR 1303.1, created in 1977, amended in 2008. Hearings reports are likely available and will have scientific, industry, and public-interest statements.
Kind of needs a caveat: ... for engines not designed to safely operate with other fuels. I.e. it's not that we need Avgas 100LL to make piston-engined planes possible, we just have a lot of plane engines around that need it. (and one can argue that industry has sat on the problem a bit, because why change as long as 100LL is readily available. (and making 100% compatible fuel replacements indeed appears to be difficult, as far as I know there is only one that has any kind of permits for one plane type, and that also has somewhat nasty additives - so changing the engines is the thing to do)
Its almost entirely small hobby planes 2-4 passenger. Almost none of those planes have any real reason to still exist. Its basically rich or upper middle people that don't care they are literally poisoning people while they tool around with their hobby.
You're not entirely wrong. Aviation is a hobby that is difficult to engage in if you don't have money. But flying those same planes is exactly where your commercial pilots are trained. It takes 1500 flight hours (certainly this number is wrong but too lazy to look up the current ATP minimum) to be eligible for the license to fly passengers on commercial airlines. A substation portion of those hours are as paid instructors.
Interesting. So basically the large airlines are skirting the poisoning issue by essentially passing it off to tiny training companies? Kind of like how we "recycle" our electronics by shipping them to a poor country.
Small single engine planes == hobby? No. The vast majority of the hours flown in these planes are for commercial purposes. If you are going to focus your ire anywhere - it should be on these money making enterprises that don't (have to) upgrade their infrastructure.
The negative externalities of your passions, your work, your hobbies, your personal life are currently poisoning thousands of people. You are currently typing on a computer built with rare earth elements mined in poor countries with slave labor. You probably eat shrimp on occasion, literally harvested by people forced into literal slavery, trapped on a boat. You likely enjoy looking at and thinking about crypto, which is currently mined with massive amounts of compute powered by coal plants, which emit far more toxic byproducts than any amount of general aviation.
No one is a saint. Regulating away all the hobbies out there to minimize the impact would probably result in some sort of violent revolution, if it could even be done.
I get your point and mostly agree. However you would struggle heavily to find even one thing that 99.999% of people do that remotely compares to literally flying in the air spraying lead poison over hundreds of miles and thousands or tens of thousands of people, animals, plants that are in your way.
Its like saying lets just make all bombs nuclear cause they kill people either way. One of these things is much, much worse and can be addressed but of course will not 100% solve the problem.
I myself enjoy hunting humans, as they are the most dangerous of game. Yet I am constantly accosted at my dinner parties, it’s truly intolerable. I don’t see where these people get the nerve to act so holier than thou. We all have our vices.
Last summer GAMA received a supplemental type certificate for a 100LL replacement, called G100UL. The STC covers certain Lycoming O-320, O-360, and IO-360 piston engines, which are commonly used in light aircraft.
The blame lies at least partially on Lycoming, who developed a nice engine in the 60s and then apparently fired their R&D department.
This is a little unfair, but only very little. The engines are primitive by modern standards because the company is wildly conservative in their design philosophy. The engines are quite reliable if run within their design envelope and maintained according to the manual, but it requires considerably more maintenance per operation hour than a modern car engine and most modern car engines are even more reliable when properly maintained.
A version of that for cars is common enough actually. Several countries and US states have road worthiness tests that include minimum (maximum?) emissions standards that must be met. The car I drive will probably ultimately fail on emissions as standards rise over the next few years.
Well, the curious fact is that small planes (Piston General Aviation, what is discussed here) emissions are comparable to cars.
Cessna 172 (trainer plane, not known for efficiency) burns 32 l (8.5 lb) per hour at a cruising speed of 122 knots (140 mph, 226 kph). Assuming no wind, it gives mileage of 14 l / 100 km (16.5 miles per gallon).
Taking into account that there are much less planes than cars, they emit 0.13% of all the CO2, emitted by transportation, comparing to 81% of motor vehicles (623 times less) [1]. So I would say their lead emissions are too low to bother (and mostly harm their owners who are close to the exhausts). Would be nicer, of course, to use unleaded, but not a big deal to lobby for legislations.
I live in a county with emissions standards. Vehicles over 25 years old are exempt. There are reasonable ways to implement rising standards by exempting older ones.
I've lived in two places that required emissions testing. In both, the vehicles were held to the standard in place at the time it was built, not the current highest standard.
So many things were making it slowly less and less viable through extra costs/requirements would've likely been the better plan, but instead nothing changes until at some point there is enough pressure for change, and then there's complaints its "so suddenly". (I think with Avgas that has happened a tiny bit through storage regulations - its sufficiently more annoying to keep around that some places don't offer it anymore, making it a tiny bit less attractive for plane buyers)
I looked into the cost of flight lessons in a small plane, the cost of using an airport runway, and fuel. It was extremely expensive to me and I make 6 figures.
Then you have very different priorities than an airplane owner. You pay for plenty of things that are extremely expensive, you just choose different things.
I too make six figures, and I don't think I do anything as expensive as completing flight school and co-owning a Cessna. I mean, my house is more expensive than that, I guess, and my car is (barely) more expensive than flight school might be, but surely amateur pilots have houses and cars too. About the only expense I have that might come close to serious flying as a hobby would be pets, but outside of the one time we had to pay for chemo for our dog it's not that expensive.
We could buy them up and scrap them as their value declines while also working to outlaw 100LL at the ~4000 FBOs in the US that still carry the fuel. At some point, demand decline encounters an inflection point where it's no longer economically feasible ("death spiral") to continue to provide 100LL fuel to FBOs.
Cash for clunkers was only tenable because the recipients of the cash were predominantly the working poor. Even then, economic conservatives howled at the program for its destruction of capital.
The first recipients were new car buyers. Hardly the working poor.
You could argue those buying new cars bought clunkers from the working poor for their above-market trade-in value, but that only works for the poor if they didn’t need to replace that clunker because everything used went up in price.
Most of the planes flying were made in 60's and 70's. Most of them can be bought below $100K. Most owners of 100LL burning planes are middle class. Wealthy people fly jets or at least turboprops and burn Jet-A.
I think deciding if something is unjust should factor in the impact. If someone has a 1990 Honda Civic that is their only means of getting to work and suddenly it's illegal due to pollution that's one thing. However if someone's private jet needs an expensive upgrade then that's another impact.
Yeah, but you would need a new type certificate if the model of the engine is different from the version that was certified. Not to mention, you'd need a lead-free-compatible engine that physically fits into the plane.
True! But for many popular airframe/engine combinations there are companies which hold supplemental type certificates (STCs) for the conversion, see for instance Petersen Aviation who have a dedicated website for STCs covering conversion to auto fuel: https://www.autofuelstc.com/
The only way to know for sure is to test a few soil samples from the yard and dust samples from inside the house. Also test the water, especially if it is well water.
If you plan to have kids there, the test might be worth it for your peace of mind. If there are no kids I would not bother.
Also, a quick way to estimate local prevailing winds near an airport is to look at the runway direction. Planes like to land into head winds so if there's only a single runway, those winds are mostly in one direction down the runway.
> children living within 1.5 miles of the Reid-Hillview Airport have elevated levels of lead in their blood, and that the problem gets much worse for those who live closer to or downwind from the airport.
> ...children under the age of 18 living close to Reid-Hillview had blood lead levels over 1.8 micrograms per deciliter. In 3.2% of the children surveyed, that number was as high as 3.5 micrograms, and in 1.7% of children it was 4.5 micrograms. Average baseline lead levels in children across the U.S. are closer to 0.84 micrograms.
If it hadn't been for leaded fuel, lead paint, football / TBI, my parents smoking, and getting rolled off a changing table as a baby, I could have been intelligent. sigh
My eldest brother always joked that he lost IQ points when the doctors used forceps on him during birth. Jokes on him, the lead and the maternal smoking would've done him in anyway.
> As many as 500,000 US children (2.5%) under 6 years have BLLs ≥5 µg/dL. Each lead-exposed child costs an estimated $5600 in medical and special educational services.7 Lead exposure-related cognitive impairments cost an estimated $50.9 billion annually in lost US economic productivity.6
I'm curious what was worse, leaded gasoline or Diesel? I was reading about France's phase out of leaded gasoline and saw that it happened relatively late with unleaded appearing on the market in 1990 and leaded gasoline being banned in 1995 only.
But before that, it seems that Diesel had started getting popular in the 80s and 90s.
Having said that, a lot of countries do a poor job of lead control/monitoring in plumbing/water distribution.
> There is growing evidence that the scale of problems with lead in drinking water has been under-estimated in Europe, due to inadequate monitoring. Particularly in the older districts of towns and cities, where lead pipes can be common
It’s quite a rabbit hole to go through. Distribution pipes, pH, corrosion control, service lines, internal piping, leaching for PVC even, interior fittings, flow rates, consumption patterns…
I think most people are not aware how bad it used to be. I went to India a couple years ago, and could taste the air pollution from the traffic on the tip of my tongue. Its horrendous. Give you headaches bad. I don't think they use catalytic converters over there on majority of cars and motorcycles. Once electric goes mainstream, it will seriously boost and extend the quality of life of billions of people.
What about shooting ranges? Heard hickock45 on Youtube crunching as he walked and realized that the gravel I was seeing was actually spent casings. Maybe another reason not to take the kids to the range. Do COVID-mitigation factors help with lead dust/aerosols?
Yes, gunsmoke does contain lead and it's not something you want to breathe in. Surgical masks will do very little, N99 or respirators will do better. However it's best practice to always wash your hands and preferably shower after shooting.
This also applies to handling or reloading ammo. Primers are lead-based compounds (generally lead styphnate) and most bullets are either soft lead or jacketed lead. If you are handling ammo, bullets, or spent casings, wash your hands after.
There is obviously a continuum of exposure and different routes of exposure here. Lead on your hands isn't ideal but if you don't touch your face or eat with dirty hands, kinda whatever. With smoke, you breathe it in simply by being there. You definitely want to look at the airflow on an indoor range, there should be a considerable amount of "whoosh" and palpable airflow, and even then it's probably still a low or moderate amount of exposure. Outdoors ranges will have even less exposure, but probably still not zero, you're still right near the breech.
And yeah generally kids are more susceptible to lead exposure than adults. Not that it's great for adults but it will truly mess up your development to get significant exposure as a child.
"orange lava soap" with the pumice in it is also better than just regular hand soap, as it's more abrasive and will do a better job scraping the lead off.
All good, but what about the lead leaching into the ground and water at outdoor ranges? Is there any requirement to test if e.g. you shoot on private property?
In Canada you could be licenced to shoot outdoors on your own property (e.g. PAL + non-restricted firearm), but not be allowed to use the area habitually, or repeatedly as that would make it a shooting range. It seems like having a shooting gallery or plinking spot with persistent targets would fail the test.
No requirements, no tests. There's a bunch of stories of indoor gun ranges being horrifically contaminated, due to lead from the primer compounds when ignited + vaporized lead from the back of the bullet (back of the bullet is almost always exposed lead core, so you get some vaporized with the explosion). Some maintenance workers, demolition crews etc working on these buildings have had terrible, life altering exposures.
I do a lot of shooting and avoid indoor ranges. They are so contaminated there are many cases of cops coming home and poisoning their kids due to contamination on clothing, shoes, etc.
I personally buy "clean fire" ammo, which has no exposed lead core on the bullet, and has clean burning primers. More expensive, but I like to keep my brain healthy, and I have kids that could easily get exposed.
Electric cars are helping in two ways: they move the carbon emissions from our playgrounds to the powerplants, and also said powerplants will have better filtering and efficiency than a mobile unit optimised for weight and dimensions.
Improved childhood nutrition outstrips the negative effect of lead poisoning. IQs may have been lower than their potential but still higher than in previous generations. Also, the impacts of lead contamination are not evenly distributed through populations.
"For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains--in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man's lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels."
I am a member of my old school's alumni orgnization and at our meetups, nearly all the other alumni are 17-25 years younger than me, and frighteningly intelligent, and I am very much hoping that lead poisoning accounts for this...
This is highly tangential, but abuse of a fetus needs to be a federal crime. My mother drank caffeine and smoked while pregnant, and I will live with the consequences for the rest of my life. It is unforgiveable.
I’m born in the early 1980ies. I could been an f-ing genius, well actually I was lucky enough to grow up far outside any city. One has to wonder if that has made any difference.
Conclusion 2: there is disappearingly little connection between IQ and socioeconomic status :)
Something that doing custom development proves with every new client...
"Specifically, children from low SES families scored on average 6 IQ points lower at age 2 than children from high SES backgrounds; by age 16, this difference had almost tripled.
...
Overall, SES was shown to be associated with individual differences in intercepts as well as slopes of intelligence. However, this finding does not warrant causal interpretations of the relationship between SES and the development of intelligence." [1]
Well, i commented based on the picture itself. Decline in IQ is obvious, decline in SES is barely noticeable.
I actually think this is because leaded gasoline makes people not (just) dumber, but also somewhat sociopathic and prone to crime, which should compensate to a degree for their lower IQ.
Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]
A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.
So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.
Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]
There is a great recent episode of Radiolab that discusses how pervasive lead is in the environment. tl;dr the background level is so high that calibrated measurement of specific samples is challenging.
Lead is heavy, even in trace quantities and after being initially airborne. It will deposit in soil, stream beds and sewers, particularly near roadways or transit systems. You will also find platinum-group metals accumulated in the same areas due to persistent catalytic converter atomization of running vehicles. Disturbing the soils (wind, rain, driving, construction, etc) will redistribute the tiny lead particles into the atmosphere, despite their relative weight.
> The lead content in that study was measured in particles collected either at the roadside or at rooftop height. The chemical fingerprint closely matched that of road dust and top soils, suggesting that contaminated soil is acting as a reservoir for 20-year old lead pollution, which is continually returned to the atmosphere when disturbed. The fact that lead found at street and building height shared the same chemical signature suggests airborne lead pollution is fairly well mixed across London.
You still have measurable lead levels in the air. Essentially the rain and gravity brings it down to the ground - mostly concentrated near roadways - where it mixes with other dust and soil. From there it can then get cycled again into the air by agitation. It is unlike CFC gasses that tend to float up and are no longer present at ground level shortly after they stop being introduced.
In this regard you still have lead present in the air in varying degrees 20 years after it stopped being introduced. The report cites 2% of 1990 levels nearly 20 years after it was outlawed.
Watched my neighbor powersand lead paint off his house yesterday. He wasn't even wearing a mask. Makes you wonder how many decades until we don't have as much lead in the environment? 50 years?
I wouldn't be surprised if we find out something similar a decade or two from now about phthalates in plastics and personal care products, except for their effects on hormone levels rather than IQ.
We continue to see capitalism choose profit over the health and wellbeing of _every_ living thing on the planet. Industries suppressing anything that paints them in a bad light, lobbying to get laws favoring them passed, and ignoring and actively lying about the long term harm that they perpetuate so they can have _number go up_ in their bank statements.
Reduced intelligence is always a “problem” with almost any generation. I’ve just seen a statistic that for the first time since 1970, youth math scores have dropped. Most of this is not a big problem
There is so many other factors at play here than lead levels. Lead levels are tied to calendar - many MANY other things changed with the calendar in line with that which could have affected measured IQ. This feels like a millenial/boomer rally tweet masquerading as science.
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of ideology, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
Nice try millenials. But the boomers grew up in times of lower car ownership and general road traffic - so while there was leaded petrol - the exposure to lead wasn't necessarilly so high. What do we call the generation of around 1980? Late Gen-X? They're probably the ones at most risk.
Ah, my generation! The ones whose video games, at least during our elementary school years, were good enough to be really fun, but also bad enough that we'd eventually get bored of them and go ride bikes or hit each other with sticks or some other healthy activity, all of our own volition.
I remain tentatively skeptical of "saving" features in video games. They may be one of the great social ills of our time. Going back to the beginning if you lose may have been a healthy kind of frustrating.
I'm curious how leaded fuel effected children born in the Roman empire, as they were born before 1990 and had not discovered leaded fuel gasoline yet (or combustion engines).
Some time ago there was a link to an article here on HN about lead poisoning in ancient Rome. It mentioned how they used to boil grape juice (to concentrate its natural sugars) in lead containers.
Edit: doh, should have clicked on your link. That was the article.
99 years ago the League of Nations signed a treaty banning indoor leaded paint. The US, of course, declined to join and it took another 50 years before it took action. Concerns were raised about leaded gasoline, industry steamrolled the science.
And it was just a couple of months ago that the final country (Algeria) stopped producing leaded consumer road fuel.
For a good history see
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...
[0] An Update on Childhood Lead Poisoning https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5645046/
As many as 500,000 US children (2.5%) under 6 years have BLLs ≥5 µg/dL. Each lead-exposed child costs an estimated $5600 in medical and special educational services.7 Lead exposure-related cognitive impairments cost an estimated $50.9 billion annually in lost US economic productivity.6