A number of factors affect home building in general, and factory built aircraft in particular. The thousands of folks who have paid good money to hold an STC for auto fuel find their investment null and void unless they can find a legal way to substitute "O" rings seals and gaskets that will swell up and fail when exposed to alcohol in the fuel. How this affects resale price is another factor. Do you wink at the new owner and say all of the fuel system is alcohol compatible, don't worry about it. Or do the right thing and get permission to make the needed changes when there may only be 3 FAA people left who will actually sign it off as legal?
If you are flying a home built that you did not build, have you investigated the possibility that the fuel system has been decomposing from prior use of auto fuel, even though you only use 100LL?
If you built the plane you have now, do you know for a fact that the fuel system is 100% compatible with alcohol? Keeping in mind that some fuel tank sealants from years back were not compatible with alcohol.
Many epoxies used in aircraft construction (foam moldless construction) are not at all compatible with alcohol.
I discovered that some fuel cell foams are not compatible with alcohol. You can tell this by the orange snot plugging the fuel filters. Then there is the long down time while the bladders are removed and scrubbed out with soap and water.
Where the wet wing is assembled with epoxy it becomes critical to protect the epoxy from alcohol.
In metal wet wing planes the type of sealant used to form the tanks is critcal. You may never use auto fuel in it, but the idiot, you loan it to may well have. If the line boys misfuel one aircraft a week with jetA, how hard would it be to dump in a load of auto fuel? Not as hard as jet A.
Half way to Cashpoor Montana you look at the wing root sight gage and it is snow white. What could that be ???????
The sad part of all of this is that the government made the choice for you. And that choice depends on where you live. Most locations need alcohol in the winter. Other places, winter and summer. Other places neither winter or summer. This is to say nothing about the reduced performance of the alcohol containing fuel vice the uncontaminated auto fuel. Less energy. Less range, lower power output. Collects and holds more water.
Pieces corrode that had not in the past been a problem.
It affects us because the rotary runs better on lower octane fuel, rather than higher octane fuel. A lot of folks can afford $3.60 car gas that cannot afford $6.70 100LL. So, in general there is less flying going on, and that is bad news for us, for kids who had the aviation bug, and for the future of America.
Lynn E. Hanover
Not to single out Ben, but what does the politics of corn/ethanol production
have to do with rotary engines in aircraft? Can we please stop this?
Maybe get back to the original point of what impact have those of you
currently flying using mogas with ethanol noticed? Ethanol use in aircraft
is one of those sacred donts (kinda like using car engines in airplanes).
What I want to know is how applicable is this aviation folklore to those of
us flying rotaries in day VFR airplanes? I dont recall seeing scores of cars
pulled over on the shoulder of the road with failures directly attributable
to ethanol use.
Mike Wills
RV-4 N144MW