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Aircraft Ownership Regulatory

High-Octane Unleaded: Where Are We?

The California legislature passed a leaded avgas ban for 2031. There’s a fleet-wide, high-octane unleaded avgas that is ready to go, but distributors won’t deliver.

Rick Durden
Verified

Edited By:

Omar Filipovic

For over three decades the FAA has been involved with various programs that have been working to get rid of tetraethyl lead (TEL) in high-octane aviation gasoline. The goal is to define a high-octane unleaded avgas that is a drop-in replacement for 100LL for every spark-ignition piston engine aircraft—fleet wide.

The desire to get lead out of avgas isn’t a recent development. In October 1931, Dr. Jimmy Doolittle (Ph. D. Aeronautics, MIT, 1925), then an employee of Shell, was making one of his many record-setting flights in a Laird Super Solution. On the last leg of the flight, he carried a container of tetraethyl lead (TEL) that he would be using to increase the octane of the avgas available at his last stop up to what was needed for his aircraft.

Rick Durden

Senior Editor Rick Durden has written for Aviation Consumer since 1994 and specializes in aviation law. Rick is an active CFII and holds an ATP with type ratings in the Douglas DC-3 and Cessna Citation. He is the author of The Thinking Pilot’s Flight Manual or, How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It, Vols. 1 & 2.