An FAA committee that has taken on the daunting challenge of drawing up plans for the eventual switch from 100LL aviation fuel to unleaded avgas has submitted its final report. The conclusion? A “drop-in” replacement for 100LL currently doesn’t exist, and may in fact be technically infeasible, and anyway there’s little financial motive for major suppliers to create a new fuel – still, that won’t prevent the FAA and industry from developing a new unleaded fuel for the approximately 167,000 general aviation airplanes in the United States that now rely on it.
The goal is to start the transition away from 100LL by 2018, the FAA says. The reasons for the urgency are many, but mostly center on the EPA’s desire to do away with 100LL fuel as well as a number of lawsuits aimed at making that happen.
