AvGas

The thought of running out of fuel is something that scares every pilot. Even though I monitor my time aloft religiously, I find myself checking the fuel gauge every few minutes. The great thing about flying in the Southeast is that there are so many places to fuel, and they’re often just a few minutes […]

At EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, Swift Fuels announced the expansion of its high-performance UL94 Unleaded Avgas product into the US Pacific Coast corridor. The expansion will provide dozens of airfields across California with unleaded avgas. Airports in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, and San Diego counties will receive this distribution, which builds on the six-year […]

I caught the coronavirus this past October on a commercial flight returning home from Denver. My aisle seat was toward the back of the sold-out flight with an airline that refused to keep middle seats open. By hour two of the flight, there was a line for the bathroom. All those people standing over me, […]

The ultimate goal? An unleaded drop-in replacement for 100LL, the avgas we use to power a large percentage of the general aviation fleet—and particularly one that serves the roughly one-third of piston airplanes that require at least 100 octane fuel. However, achieving that goal has been elusive, based in part on three factors. First, a […]

Some accidents arrive entirely without warning, and it is hard to know what or whom to blame.

With a growing number of light aircraft taking on jet-A instead of avgas—from a diesel-powered Cessna 172 to the single-engine Cirrus VisionJet—a prudent pilot stays on guard to supervise fueling if at all possible. But anecdotally speaking, many of us have operated under the impression that misfuelling a piston airplane burning 100LL with jet fuel […]

The dangers posed by lead’s carcinogenic toxicity, whether it’s inhaled or absorbed into the bloodstream, have been well-known for decades. Lead is particularly harmful to children during their developmental years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began discussing a total ban on lead in automobile gasoline back in the mid-1980s and outlawed the heavy metal in […]