Unleaded Fuel

Joseph E. (Jeb) Burnside

Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 07:00 PM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Many privately owned, single-engine, piston aircraft (over 65%) can use cheaper mogas via an STC, offering significant savings on fuel and maintenance, with the flexibility to mix with 100LL.
Constant carbon monoxide (CO) readings as low as 10 ppm warrant immediate investigation, and 35 ppm or rapidly rising levels necessitate an emergency landing and oxygen use due to serious health risks.
Cold temperature altimeter corrections for instrument approaches are a complex and often misunderstood topic, requiring pilots to carefully apply corrections only to specified segments as per official guidance.

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Thank you for Jeb Burnside’s “Follow the Money” commentary in the April 2022 issue. I’d like to highlight another aspect of the leaded-avgas issue that aviation’s “alphabet soup” hasn’t called much attention to.

According to the EAA’s own hardcopy STC materials (but not emphasized on the EAA or AOPA web sites), “more than 65 percent of the privately owned, single-engine, piston fleet of aircraft in the United States still utilize 80 octane rated gasoline.”