wombat

Regarding the type certificate..... Is G100UL a 100 octane aviation gasoline? If my type certificate says I can use 100 octane aviation gasoline.... Umm... Maybe I missed that someone already brought this up....but it sounds like using G100UL doesn't violate any operating limitations.

Probably not. On the other hand, I would have expected Big Oil to have done significantly more testing and be less open about what testing they did.

My take-away from all of this is: #1: Based on the independent testing shown in this video: https://youtu.be/sPeQ6T3vB2E the negative effects that the OP @gabez and @larryb are probably caused by the G100UL they used. No testing was done to determine if this fuel was contaminated or if it met the manufacturer's specifications. #2: There are a lot of people that have very strong opinions about how much testing should be done prior to both making a new product available for use and making a new product a defacto requirement (such as prohibiting other options). #3: There are a lot of people that have very strong opinions about how bad the TEL from avgas is for people in the quantities and concentrations created by piston GA use. Personally, I'm disappointed that @George Braly's product seems to have this side effect and would love to hear back from him about this. This makes me less excited about the fuel, but I would still be willing to use it. I'm much happier knowing about the negative aspects than being unaware of them. This not disappointment in George or in GAMI; I don't have any evidence to indicate anything other than someone trying their best to bring a product to market legally and safely.

I somewhat disagree with you on this. Just because a new product has some flaws that old products didn't or performs more poorly than an old product did in some aspect that doesn't mean the new product isn't better or isn't worth switching to. If sealants last 99.5% as long with G100UL as they did with 100LL, that's probably a worthwhile trade-off. (average of 58 days shorter life span of 30 years) If it's 10% as long as with 100UL, it's probably not worth it. Now I'd love new products that have no regressions whatsoever but that's rarely the case.

My wife flies on the airlines fairly often. She always grabs a couple of sic sacks and puts them in the Mooney. *sigh*. Unfortunately that's actually true so I usually have to clear out a dozen or so from my plane once or twice a year.

Not grass, but I fly my turbo Mooney out of a 2,700' runway at 1,600 MSL. It's totally acceptable although during the summer I will not plan any flights departing in the afternoon unless the plane is very light.

Thank you. We need more people like you who are not out to recover every loss. If the shop was to deliberately fail to do the work that would be one thing but a good faith effort is all we usually pay for and good faith efforts are not guarantees that nothing will go wrong. This is how I operate too.

I agree and commend you for being extremely professional about how you are dealing with this. In my opinion, I think that everybody on this thread and the other has been really grown-up about this.

I think we have data to conclude with some reasonable degree of certainty that the new fuel does not adversely affect sealants at the very least. While @George Braly certainly does have incentives to show his fuel in the best light, he has described and shown data from testing on several sealant samples. While there is always room for more testing I think what he's done provides a reasonable degree of certainty on the sealants. While it is possible that his results are not representative of the fleet through either his deliberate influence or chance, I have a really hard time thinking it would be deliberate. More likely in my opinion is that a number of fuel tanks are sealed with inappropriate materials installed by 'hangar gnomes' because that was cheap and quick and seemed to work. Although what materials G100UL could degrade in a week that 100UL wouldn't degrade after months or years would seem to me to be a very small list. It could be that similar testing has been done for paints and I'm just not aware of it. I'll also restate something I said in another thread: If we were switching the other way (From G100UL to 100LL) and even not counting the health effects of the TEL, the entire community would be against the switch. I don't believe that G100UL is a flawless product, but I do believe that it's better than the one we have now. And while pointing out any flaws that G100UL might have is potentially good because this might lead to a 'fix' for them, preventing adoption until all possible flaws are fixed is not good in my opinion.

Between @larryband the OP @gabez we have two people that claim that within a week of adding G100UL to their tank they've had paint peeling. A couple of ideas on what could be happening: Coincidence that these things just happened to occur shortly after a fuel switch but are unrelated. The fuel as designed has a problem. The fuel has been contaminated either inadvertently or intentionally. The reporters are not being truthful about the situation. (I'm not saying it's likely or intentional but the list is incomplete if we don't include it) The ones I think we can maybe test for are #2 and #3. Could we get @George Braly some samples of the fuel from both the aircraft tanks as well as the fuel station, some of the 'stripped' paint, and maybe some paint chips or chunks that have not yet been softened?

That's too bad. Additional hurdles to compliance will result in lower compliance. That will result in increased risk.

I have the aftermarket Monroy tanks and I did a pretty good calibration on my 231 earlier this year on one of the tanks. You can see the details I recorded here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eCCiLBGDNsSlQaziJ_DnWsNmMHbi8wbwifmRALW9uVo/edit?usp=sharing The sight gauge is accurate for the first 20 gallons but then it starts showing low because of the fuel in the aux tanks. Their highest marked measurement is 30 gallons I think but the needle continues moving for quite a while further. I estimated a '37 gallons' position' because that's as far as it moves. The gauge stops moving above about 45 gallons and I can fit more than 52.5 gallons in. I suppose it would be possible to re-mark the sight gauges with the top measurement at 45 gallons but that's WAY too much work.

Project Farm did a comparison test of several ceramic coatings:

99% joking here, but 1% honest... as a business minded person you should not own a GA plane. The number of times when it makes financial sense are so small that you shouldn't even try. I recommend like the others have said that you buy the plane you want with the most equipment you want that you can afford already installed and even with a timed out engine. Then you just fly it until you find some reason why you have to overhaul it. The longer the plane is down in maintenance for the engine overhaul, the better a deal it is for you because you won't be flying it and throwing money away! hahaha

@StParkin I've been flying out of the Puget Sound area for about 15 years now. If you want to fly in the winter, TKS (Preferably FIKI) is probably the most important factor. The next is having a turbo. Having both is the bee's knees. But even if you don't have them you can still fly a lot in the winter through careful flight planning and some schedule flexibility. If you have a TKS but not a turbo you'll still have good enough performance in the winter due to cold temps and can make it over the mountains more easily. Then in the summer you can fly VFR and your lower performance will still get you where you want to go since you are not as limited on routes and altitudes. As far as the Rockies go, by the time you get to them you'll have had plenty of time to climb to altitude, even at an extremely low climb rate. You will be able to get to 15,000+ and while there are probably some mountains you won't want to go directly over you can pretty much pick any route you want.

Between the TKS and old airframe and paint, I don't think I can quite make that. I did it once, but I had tailwinds that were closer to 75KT. We could have our LOP discussion here, but so far I have not been able to make it run LOP without stumbling occasionally. Unfortunately I've been too focused on making the individual flights get from A to B to spend much time actually playing around with it.

@bloghill Welcome to the Rocket club!! I've had mine for about 1.5 years and 200 hours and love it. @201Steve I tend to get about 190KTAS on mine. I usually fly at the 72% 'Normal Cruise' power setting, I expect the seller was at the 65% 'Economy Cruise' power setting based on his fuel flow statement. While we can fly faster, the fuel consumption is a lot higher. Much of the time I am either going to Seattle and back, which is relatively short (< 1 hour) and is mostly in the climb or descent so a higher cruise power setting won't make much difference. Or I'm on a much longer XC (2S0 <-> KFFL) where I'm fuel limited and I usually then finesse the fuel flow and power settings to get the range & reserve I want.

I don't think there is debate about if ADS-B can save lives. The debate is about if ADS-B's lives saved per dollar is a good deal compared to other safety investments. There shouldn't be a debate though: the ROI on ADS-B is bad compared to other safety investments. Yet people still freak out about ADS-B or lack thereof. Nobody freaks out about not having CIES or other accurate fuel gauges and a fuel computer but the total savings in lives per dollar spent would be a lot higher if we mandated that instead of ADS-B. Also, in the recent mid-air you reference it's just as reasonable to say that ADS-B caused the accident because the person in the best position to see the other plane (The copilot side CAP pilot) stopped looking outside and was looking at his iPad just before the accident. If he didn't have that to stare at he might have continued looking outside and the collision may have been avoided.

My point on all of this is that we should be focusing on reducing the risks that are higher rather than the ones that are lower. That doesn't mean "Don't do anything about the lower ones." It doesn't mean "ADS-B doesn't provide any safety value." But it does mean many pilots have an inaccurately high estimate of risk of midair collisions relative to other things that are likely to kill them and it is causing them to put themselves at increased risk when flying because they are spending time/effort/money both on the ground and in the air on mitigating the already low mid-air collision risk rather than the risks that are significantly higher. Fuel starvation, loss of control, and VFR-into-IMC kills way way more pilots than mid-air collisions. Pilots of all experience levels and certificates. I have a very hard time believing anyone who says "I've mitigated all those other risks as much as I possibly can such that mid-air collisions are now one of the biggest risks I face." I much more strongly suspect that those pilots are unknowingly experiencing the hazardous attitudes of invulnerability and resignation.

There is no amount of situational awareness that is going to have as big of a positive effect on your safety as additional flight instruction and practice will. And 5 people in the pattern when you are 15 miles out doesn't mean much anyway. By the time you get there the situation will be different. Listen to the radio and look out the window. There is no guarantee that everybody is talking on the radio. There is no guarantee that you'll see everybody near you. Yes, having ADS-B in will help some. I've never said it doesn't help. All I've ever said is that people are acting as if it's a huge boost to safety, and it's not. The only way to ensure safety in light GA is to not go fly. Not many of us want that. I mean, here we are, all on a forum for a specific manufacturer of light GA airplanes! I think the ADS-B thing is kind of like the Cirrus parachutes. They do provide some additional safety, but the amount of additional safety they provide is not necessarily the highest value. While it's sometimes fun to poke at Cirrus pilots for their excessive parachute expenses with marginal real-world safety value, there is real and measurable additional safety to be had by having the parachute. Is it as much additional safety as if they had spent that extra money on training? I don't think so. And if someone comes to me and says "I won't ever fly in a plane without a parachute, and you are putting people's lives at risk if you fly them in a plane without a parachute." I'll have the same discussion we've been having here. This thread is intended to ask the question "Why do people get so freaked out about not having this one feature when it is a lower return on investment for safety expenses than other possibilities?"

@EricJ That procedure sounds horribly risky and the businesses that are putting profit over safety and should re-evaluate their culture regarding safety. I recommend that they talk to the FAA to help them come up with a better procedure or work within their organization to come up with a better procedure on their own. Some ideas: Hold somewhere else. Limit training flights that are using that ILS approach like ATC uses flow control at major airports. Perform training flights somewhere else. There are several other airports within 75NM that have precision approaches. Flight Training Devices are also quite effective and can be used to reduce the amount of time a student must fly to gain proficiency, particularly for IFR. That being said, when we look at the main causes of accidents at a national level, here is how they tend to stack up, and given your situation, what I think your relative risk is: Loss Of Control, Inflight You are at high risk for this. Flight training requires performance maneuvers, ground reference maneuvers, and stalls. VFR into IMC You are at low risk of this in Arizona. Fuel You are less likely to have this in a school training environment because almost all flights are < 2 hours and students tend to be diligent about checking before flight and there are no pressures to find cheaper fuel and the additional 'cost' to get fuel added before a flight is minimal. Maintenance You are at elevated risk of this since the pilots are all flying different planes and can't tell what has changed between flights in the same plane. Using the planecrashmap.com website, I looked at the 50 closest accidents to the VOR, and of the two accidents that I found that are mid-air collisions, one looks like aerobatic maneuvering in formation: https://planecrashmap.com/plane/az/N64WD/. and https://planecrashmap.com/plane/az/N2766C/. (Two planes involved, of course. This happened in 1989) and the other looks like training flights: https://planecrashmap.com/plane/az/N4184M/ and https://planecrashmap.com/plane/az/N8115Q/ (Two planes involved, one with a Portable Collision Avoidance System (PCAS) unit, this is from 2012) So even given your situation mid-air collisions are not a major source of accidents although due to your environment you have probably mostly eliminated two of the most common accident causes (Fuel and VFR into IMC). If you want to increase your safety by spending money on hardware, I recommend two things before buying ADS-B: Accurate fuel gauges and a fuel management system. An AoA indicator. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't also have and use ADS-B, but we should be honest with ourselves here that the risk they are mitigating is small compared to others that we are not mitigating, but could, and for less money. It is therefore weird that people focus so much on ADS-B to mitigate the risk of mid-air collisions. It's like a smoker who is worried about leaded gas from a nearby GA airport. Of course I'm not saying that all of the other safety precautions are inappropriate. But I am saying it's inappropriate to fixate on a lesser risk when there is are bigger risks that can be mitigated for less effort. Like when overweight guys spend thousands of dollars to buy bicycles that are 2 Oz lighter... They would be so much better off if they spent that money on a personal trainer or nutrition coach. I agree that it is a higher risk in your operations than in mine. But still smaller than other risks we both face and fail to mitigate. I'll quote @Aaviationist here:

I've heard that before. I find it hard to believe ATC is letting IFR traffic self-separate using ADS-B only with vertical spacing of 500 feet. Can you tell me exactly where this happens and some times I might be able to see this on FlightAware so I can see it for myself? The rate of mid-air collisions has not changed significantly since ADS-B adoption has increased significantly. The rate of mid-air collisions is very small, and even out of those things that might kill you as a pilot in an airplane it's quite small. So why is it that you think this is such a large risk when it is in fact so small? And why do you fixate on ADS-B being a 'solution' to this problem?

I like ADS-B too. It is helpful. But we should be clear that the risk it's helping to mitigate isn't a very big one to begin with. The system was not designed to help mitigate the risk of mid-air collisions, it was designed to help with the cost of ATC RADAR maintenance costs. It's not that ADS-B is worthless or useless, but the reduction in risk it provides is minimal. Maybe think of it like this: Looking at your ADS-B is about the same level of accuracy as getting a report from ATC of other traffic when they are not seeing you directly but using RADAR. If you are in the traffic pattern, it's effectively useless. Like when ATC says "Airport is at 12 O'clock, 10 miles, multiple targets in the pattern, report airport in sight." Once they are done with that, it's up to you and your eyes.

I agree that this is the core issue with a bunch of other people, but I'm not one of them. I'm fine with people not having it and not using it (when it is legal to do so). It's very effective and useful for its primary task, which is to reduce cost for the FAA, and it's marginally useful at best for the task of traffic separation for flights not controlled by ATC. At this point, I don't think there is enough data to measure if it has had any positive effect on safety.

I wouldn't say it helps you look outside more, but I agree with you that it can help you look outside more effectively. And I also agree that if it doesn't help you be more effective at looking outside, you are doing it wrong. One training task that I give to students (only when they are receiving instruction, not when solo) is to fly the traffic pattern without the ASI. Also without the DG, altimeter, or any cockpit instruments at all. I do the reverse of foggles using some sheets of paper. It is still surprising to me how accurate they are on altitude, airspeed, and engine settings just using the feel and weight of the controls, the sound of the air flowing over the airplane, and the sound of the engine. Typically they will be +- 50' on altitude in the pattern and +-5 knots on airspeed, as well as +- 75 RPM for the engine. This doesn't mean I think people should regularly fly without those instruments but it does help them gain confidence to spend more time looking outside and use the cockpit instruments as an occasional cross-check. Chasing needles hardly ever results in a good flight. Human nature in this regard does not have positive dynamic stability. . As an example, as long as people are still above where they want to be, they push forward more on the yoke... So by the time they are back at the correct altitude, they'll have a high rate of descent. They blast through their altitude picking up airspeed... So they start pulling back, and as long as they are below, they'll continue pulling back.... This is pilot induced oscillation. I agree that you should use every tool you can for situational awareness. And ADS-B can improve situational awareness, but I probably wouldn't say it goes a 'long ways'. But maybe that's just me. And I agree with you yet again that people that stare at it are not actually getting as much benefit as they could. Maybe if the FAA mandated it and didn't allow exceptions that would help, but without 100% adoption, staring at the ADS-B data is likely increasing risk more than mitigating it. I agree. And I am trying to figure out what about ADS-B makes people be illogical about it. Perhaps if I had been more careful in my phrasing earlier I wouldn't have gotten people so defensive about it. A tactic that I often employ successfully is to ask questions to which I already know the answers and then try to clarify answers given to me by asking questions that will help the other person think through it logically when they try to answer. How would this have gone if I said "I have an airplane equipped with X systems, but doesn't have ADS-B in and out, and I've got a X dollars budget to improve my safety for this year, how should I spend my money?" And then when someone suggests putting in ADS-B, ask them about accident rates?