[proggy]

So, let’s set aside the commercial applications and just focus on general aviation for a second. Avgas, which fuels over 160,000 small planes in the US alone, contains lead [1]. Even if electric flight is only practical in the general aviation sector, it would remove one of the last remaining sources of lead pollution in our environment. A pretty big win all on its own.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/

[AKSucks]

100LL is a scourge, I completely agree - but I think the sense of scale is off. 160,000 planes that spend most of their lives sitting on the ground? I just don't buy that 100LL is a significant source of lead pollution beyond people who work at airports. The pollution pales in comparison to just one single cruise ship or one coal-fired powerplant.

Anyway.

A fifty-times-worse energy density is fundamentally incompatible with most powered flight as we know it, including GA. I know I earlier said "it will never work for commercial aviation" but really, it's the vast majority of aviation. It comes down to planes only being attractive because they're fast and go far, or carry people/shit somewhere more easily than one can via ground.

Commercial aviation makes things possible that aren't as possible in GA due to efficiency from scale and volume. For example, turbine engines are very efficient during flight (they're horrible idling, which is why you see them run as little as possible when not in flight), reliable, light, and powerful. They require little warm-up time so they're great for "we gotta go NOW" (emergency services helicopters for example), shock cooling isn't a problem so they can fly descents piston aircraft can only dream about, and of course they excel at high altitude operation which leads to even greater efficiency. They also scale very, very well.

They are also mind-boggling levels of expensive to purchase compared to a piston engine. They run for long periods between needing overhaul but those overhauls are expensive. They're ideal for uses where that cost can be amortized over a lot of use/sales.

There is no benefit of scale for battery flight. There is no benefit to near constant use; lithium ion degrades rapidly with cycling.

What needs to happen is a phase-out of 100LL, which should have happened decades ago; there's already plenty of piston aviation engines running on unleaded gas, like Rotaxes. I'll be amazed if it ever happens, because the aviation industry are far, far too invested into ancient engine technology and AOPA is a very powerful owner and industry lobby.

Their insistence on duplicating everything about 100LL except for the lead shows nobody's actually interested in progress, but stalling progress. If they were interested in progress, they wouldn't be trying to perfectly duplicate 100LL or using government funds to further subsidize aviation, which is already massively subsidized.

What should have happened is the EPA should have said "you have ten years until 100LL is illegal to purchase unless you're a museum operating a historically significant aircraft for the purposes of public demonstration. You have until then to develop retrofit parts to make your engines compatible with commercially available 100 octane gasoline, parts which your customers can easily install during one of the several overhauls they will have between now and then." Fuck doing Continental and Lycoming's homework for them. The air-cooled piston aviation industry are a bunch of absolute dinosaurs who have seen little advancement in technology in close to half a century.