Comment by tjohns
11 hours ago
Cars don't need high octane fuel, aircraft do. Outside of the absolute smallest aircraft, you can't get enough power out of automobile gasoline.
They started looking at it 14 years ago, but there's been tons of bureaucratic roadblocks that have impeded progress. (Depending on who you ask, the petroleum companies were responsible for some of these.)
Even today, there are reports that the new unleaded avgas formulations cause engine damage, and we don't entirely know why that's happening. So there's still technical issues to work out. (But it's important, so folks are trying to solve them as quickly as possible.)
"They started looking at it 14 years ago" is all you need to see that there's no urgency. They should have started looking at it 60+ years ago when it first started being a prominent issue for cars. It's not like they didn't know about the problem.
All of that stuff could have been overcome a lot faster if there had been motivation to do so. What they should have done is declare, with plenty of advance warning (say, 10 years), that leaded avgas was going to become illegal when leaded car gas became illegal in 1996. If you want to keep flying, figure out how to do it without lead.
The reason it's taking ages is because the FAA just doesn't care that much. The EPA hasn't pushed on it very much. The FAA's priority is minimizing the impact to aviation, not protecting the public from lead pollution, so as long as the EPA doesn't push them, the FAA is content to take things very slow.
Put it on a shorter timeline and solutions would happen faster. Some of those solutions might involve some aircraft being retired due to not being viable in an unleaded world. The FAA doesn't want that, but it should have been done.