About a month ago, we reported on a new developmental fuel project called G100UL, meant as a direct, unleaded replacement for 100LL. At the time, George Braly, whose General Aviation Modifications, Inc. is running this project, promised to invite me down to watch a test cell run and actually fly the stuff.

Despite horrid weather, he was true to his word: On Thursday afternoon, I firewalled the throttle on a Cirrus SR22 at GAMI's Ada, Oklahoma home airport. "Congratulations," said Braly, "you're one of the first pilots to fly with the future fuel for general aviation." Gotta give the man credit for unbridled confidence if nothing else.

We spent the morning burning some G100UL in the test cell, comparing its detonation margin, BSFC and energy generation to 100LL. Bottom line: It's pretty close to 100LL across the board. It's a little heavier than avgas--6.4 pounds compared to 6.0 pounds--but it has higher energy density so it's within a couple of percentage points of being a wash. The governing spec for avgas is ASTM D910 and at this juncture, G100UL appears close to meeting it. There are some minor deviations that don't appear significant to me.

My knee-jerk journalistic skepticism prevents me from anointing G100UL as The One. I'd like to know more about the formulation and see some additional testing, but nothing I've seen so far remotely suggests that G100UL has any technical showstoppers. The octane is good, early tests have revealed no worries about seal and hose softening nor are there any apparent handling concerns related to toxicity, but it's still early in the test program. At the moment, nothing is guaranteed, so you should keep your Missouri Show Me hat in place. In aviation, disappointment is a constant companion.

What's most curious is the industry's reaction to this out-of-the-blue fuel development. It's almost as if no one wants to believe it. Braly has had to do some arm twisting to get the FAA interested and reports real resistance to his proposal to fast track this stuff. AOPA and EAA are interested, of course, and although invited, they weren't able to send representatives to Thursday's demo. GAMA's Greg Bowles did attend, despite the weather. The FAA also demurred.

There are several reasons why the industry is initially sleepwalking through this. One is that the search for a new fuel has become an end in itself. Ultimately, the entire exercise has had a degree of pointlessness to it because the EPA has never been serious about eliminating lead from avgas, so the industry has been on a free ride for 30 years. Against that backdrop, why would a refinery want to build a gasoline for which there is no ready market? Also, some may have felt burned by the Swift Fuel project, which hasn't yet delivered what many thought it might.

Now, with the Friends of the Earth breathing down the EPA's neck on the lead issue, it appears that the agency may be about to get serious about lead regulation. The big risk is that aviation interests have become so comfortable with the endless search as an industry unto itself that it may not know how to do the turn-on-a-dime that's desperately needed. Because the FAA and Coordinated Research Council boxed themselves in by requiring any new fuel to meet the current avgas ASTM D910 spec, it all but guaranteed that nothing ever would.

GAMI is outside the fuel development Gun Club loop. Many in the industry don't know of GAMI's technical expertise and haven't see the companies' sophisticated test cell and graduate-level analysis of the combustion process. In the fuel world, GAMI is just an annoying upstart, if you will.

Millions of dollars have been spent on research and some viable fuels seemed to have been proposed. But they never went forward because they didn't match the expectation of the present. This is, of course, the definition of in-the-box thinking. GA is, if nothing else, capable of stunning myopia at times.

If G100UL has legs--and it's impossible to say at this juncture if it does or it doesn't--the people at the pointy end of solving this problem need to get on it like white on rice. It should be advanced through testing as quickly as possible. If it's a dud, let's find out as soon as possible. If it's the real thing, let's get on with having refiners build the stuff and quit jacking around with all the fly speck reasons why we can't make this happen. Hand wringing over D910 ought to be replaced with--I dunno--actual problem solving. If we just keep in mind that the goal is a fuel that works, not meeting a spec for one that soon won't, we'll be fine.

Increasingly, I am beginning to get the impression that when the history of 100LL is written, finding its replacement will look like a bunch of well meaning, sincere guys stumbling around a pitch black forest with a half-dead flashlight. If anybody had bothered to look over their shoulder, they might have seen that the great shining city on the hill was there all along.

View comments by other members (25) | Post comments

There's a natural detachment that occurs when it comes to dealing with Washington, D.C. and it's not just the politicians who are involved. The ivory tower perspective gets the odd mention when it comes to coverage of the organizations that represent aviation. With the exception of EAA, they are based in the Washington area and I'll bet EAA's frequent flyer points accumulated on flights to Dulles and DCA are considerable. There's a reason for that and the White House's decision to scrap aviation user fees from the 2011 budget is a good example.

Not long after the first public utterance of the term "user fees" by then-FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, I was invited to a conference call involving the presidents of all the "alphabet groups" as we sometimes call them.

I'd read the proposal and something seemed obvious to me. User fees would have a far greater impact on business aviation than any other sector of GA. In fact, the more populous (read vote potential) piston sector was assured that no such infamy would befall them. Only turbine aircraft on IFR flight plans would be affected.

So, I asked the question to which I already knew the answer, which is something we have to do at times. Was the FAA trying trying to create division within the GA sector in the hopes of getting this hugely unpopular proposal passed?

The answer was political in nature. Of course not, I was assured, because it simply couldn't happen. GA is an alliance of like minds that understands the grass-roots importance of every aspect of non-airline aviating, from grass strip to the GV and Global Express.

I dutifully recorded those comments and watched over the years as GA out-politicked Washington. Make no mistake. The Washington bureaucracy believes that a European-style system of user-pay access to airports, navigation and weather services, one that stifles GA and heavily subsidizes airlines is the "efficient" way to keep America flying.

The airlines, of course, had their people working full bore for a system of fees that would have required a Cessna Mustang with a maximum of six people aboard to be considered an equal participant in the system to an A380.

It was ludicrous and everyone in aviation knew it.

So everyone in aviation fought it and it was a remarkable thing.

At every major aviation event, the leaders of EAA, AOPA, NATA, NBAA and GAMA presented a unified front, even though two of those groups, those with far and away the largest memberships, had already been assured their members would not suffer under the new regime.

And they took it a step further. They went beyond the Beltway and relentlessly spread the message that an assault on any sector of GA was an assault on all of GA. They targeted specific politicians with clout and those whose constituencies were heavily dependent on GA jobs. They called in favors, they made friends and they thoroughly defeated a movement that looked good to government bean counters but made no sense to operation of aircraft in the country.

The bureaucracy in Washington still thinks it was right in proposing this and it won't let go of that notion easily. Sometimes, however, a common sense argument presented by a unified force is enough to make the politicians listen to the people instead of the giant machine that rumbles under their feet.

View comments by other members (3) | Post comments

When does a good promotional idea for aviation cross the line into a stupid stunt that makes us all look like a bunch of morons? My friend Jeff Owen of Premier Aircraft e-mailed me this week posing this very question. He was referring to the story we ran earlier this week describing Chet and Matt Pipkin's plan to set a record by remaining airborne in a Cessna 172 for 65 days, beating the old record by a day.

"I really don't like things that have the potential to impact our industry, which has been slaughtered already by sensationalist main stream media. We shouldn't be doing anything to help them think that we agree with, endorse or condone anything like this," says Owen.

"I have made my living for 30 years involved in aviation in one way or another and I have never been able to determine that stupid human tricks ever did anything positive for me or our industry except highlight that some of us are really stupid. Just because it is sensational does not mean that it deserves to be mentioned, let alone published--especially by an aviation media outlet as respected as AVweb."

I have to concede that he makes a good point. Do stunts like these really draw would-be pilots into the industry? Do they really cause people to pause and say, "Hey, isn't that cool; I wanna do that"? When Burt and Dick Rutan figured out how to fly around the world unrefueled, what did they really prove that was of lasting importance? Not much, actually, other than to get a remarkable airplane hung from the ceiling in the Air and Space Museum.

And speaking of ceilings, the 172 that holds the current record hangs in Las Vegas's McCarran Airport. I saw it last week and stopped to read the display notes because like everyone else, I love a spectacle and watching the world in its extremes has an irresistible allure. Non-pilots will be amazed at the mere feat while those of us who fly will be engaged by the technical challenge of doing this—the fueling, the ongoing maintenance, the human factors.

So there's no question we have to and will cover it. My personal view is this: if you talk the talk, you better walk the walk. An attempt like this needs to be carefully organized and well executed for if it fails in some spectacularly stupid way, it'll be just another sign post leading the way to the Mount of Idiots.

Otherwise, I'm okay with it. But I'm not bracing myself for the influx of pilot wannabes.

View comments by other members (31) | Post comments

When the earthquake in Haiti first struck about two weeks ago, cool heads were advising general aviation pilots to stay home and send money. This seemed to make sense at the time, when relief flights were stacked up over the single runway at Port au Prince, and general confusion ruled.

But a couple of days ago, a Massachusetts pilot, Scott Martin, turned up on YouTube with a different message. "This is an urgent request for pilots to come down with their planes to Santiago, in the Dominican Republic," he said. "The U.S. relief effort is not in touch with the reality on the ground."

He asked pilots to just get in their airplanes and fly to Fort Lauderdale Executive (FXE) and make their way to the D.R. from there, where they could load their airplanes with urgently needed medical supplies and food to deliver to outlying airfields in Haiti. I called Rol Murrow, the president of the Air Care Alliance, for his take on all this. "There are so many different perspectives," he said. Some folks are adamant that private pilots need to stay out of the way of the professionals, and if they really want to help, send money.

Murrow himself says he has a more "middling attitude," and there are a lot of factors to consider -- the capability of the airplane and the pilot primary among them. He believes there is an urgent need for a lot of additional GA help in the area, and will be for a long time to come. He suggested that any pilots who want to help should first make a connection with a relief group on the ground or work through an established volunteer pilot organization -- but he added that many of those groups may not have the manpower available to coordinate the details necessary to take advantage of those offers.

So should you answer Scott Martin's call to action, and fly to FXE? Or stay home and out of the way? I'm curious to see what AVweb readers think.

View comments by other members (21) | Post comments

So obnoxious and overpowering was the hype surrounding today’s introduction of Apple’s iPad that even my inbox started to catch some incoming. From reader Andy Taylor came this note: “I assume someone is already working on an EFB software application for the iPad? May be just the thing we've been waiting for, for search and display of approach plates, enroute charts and so on.”

As much as I hate to admit it, he’s on to something. We don’t yet know much about the technical specs of the machine, other than it looks like a giant iPod Touch, has built-in wireless and a very thin, flat display architecture. That last part is the alluring factor for an e-reader and an EFB, although true EFBs also need at least a little processing/display horsepower. If you’ve ever run maps on a Touch or iPhone, the delay in map refresh is annoying. I’d never put up with that in the cockpit. Presumably, the iPad will address this.

For the March issue of Aviation Consumer, we’re working on a comparison of electronic plate library hardware and, frankly, the killer app just isn’t out there. All of them are compromised in some way, either being too small, too slow, too large or just not ideally suited to plate display. None of this has stopped developers from flogging them into the market anyway.

So, now the iPad. Watching some of the live blogging and tweeting going on Wednesday, my crap detector was off-scale high. Whenever you hear the phrase “game changer” or, gag, “this will change your life forever,” there’s an understandable urge to find a sharp object to slit your wrists with. Perhaps I’m being unkind…

I heard a funny quote from media writer Ken Auletta who was asked shortly after the rollout if he thought the iPad would prove the savior or the struggling publishing industry. "Savior?" he replied. "If you want a savior, go to church."

What seems likely to me is that the iPad will draw more consumers into the world of e-readers. I've had a Kindle for about a year and love it. I might go for a color version, if the size and price are right. Starting at around $500, the iPad's price strikes me as about right, but its size might not be if it won't fit into a small backpack or it's too big to hold comfortably.

We will watch for aviation apps for the iPad issuing forth in due course. My prediction is that you’ll see the first one well before Sun ‘n Fun. Bets anyone?

While I’m waiting, the game hasn’t changed and my life is pretty much the same: A dark, swirling vortex of unfulfilled promises.

View comments by other members (32) | Post comments

More AVweb Insider »