Yes I remember it well but can’t find the report. It was really funny. The pilot either bought some industrial solvent, or blended it himself. It worked just fine 
Well, maybe not. If you stick a load of ethanol into a PR1422-sealed fuel tank, it will work fine until enough pieces of the sealant block the system.
But most fatal GA accident reports are speculative as to the real cause.
Cobalt wrote:
Maybe because Ethanol has only around 60 percent the energy density of gasoline?
60% of diesel maybe, but it has to be around 70% of gasoline. E85 has around 80%. But this is not the whole truth. Ethanol will increase the efficiency of combustion because it cools the mixture better before compression. Because of the high octane rating, one can also increase CR. Adding a turbo, and ethanol will be the better option with respect to fuel efficiency. I would guess these ethanol powered IO320 of this Vanguard team will be slightly worse compared with gasoline, but a larger turbo engine about the same perhaps.
My UL350i runs on anything from 95 mogas to 100LL and with 15% ethanol. I expect I will find some fuel for it until the day I pack it up for good It will probably run just fine on this snake oil 100UL as well. The only thing I have to be a bit conscious about is this UL96/94/91 (or what it’s called). It probably runs just fine, but the fuel batches the factory has tested was not even close to mogas 95 in terms of octane ratings.
LeSving wrote:
this UL96/94/91 (or what it’s called).
In Norway, I guess it is UL91. In Sweden, it could also be 91/96UL, which is a different fuel. (There are a few engines that are approved for one but not the other.)
When it comes to running piston engines on ethanol, the world’s top authority is Brazil, and Embraer has indeed certified its EMB-202A/203 Ipanema crop duster to run on ethanol. The engine is Lycoming O-540.
And another candidate for SAF, this time as an Mogas/Avgas replacement rather than Jet-A?
RAF completes world first flight with synthetic fuel
Interesting that a Canadian GA group is reporting on an event by the British RAF in GB. 
Here is possibly the UK source article:
British Air Force hails first-ever test flight using only synthetic fuel
Synthetic fuel has since long been banned in the EU, and for good reasons. It’s probably the least energy efficient thing you can think of. From the energy that goes into it, solar or wind or whatever is used, only a few percentages remains in the fuel. It’s about 5 times less efficient than batteries.
LeSving wrote:
Synthetic fuel has since long been banned in the EU
That’s not true. There are reports almost every week of manufacturer and airline flights using various mixes up to 100% using SAF:
Airlines using SAF
Not EU, but US commercial flight with 100% SAF for one engine:
100% SAF
In any case, the debate about efficiency is a different issue than safe application for operations. Any arguments based on best efficiency lead back to fossil fuels. There is increasing pressure today to place environmental concerns above cost efficiency. Batteries don’t have the potential in the foreseeable future to maintain flight for anything longer than short-haul regional distances. Best efficiency doesn’t help much if the battery’s charge is gone half way across the Mediterranean.
Is “sustainable” the same as “synthetic”?
The “synthetic” fuel was said to be made using tide or wind generated electricity to extract hydrogen from water and combine it with atmospheric CO2.
“Sustainable” includes plant sources, (and waste?).
chflyer wrote:
That’s not true.
That’s what I have heard years ago. It may not relate to aviation and marine transport though. Besides, the economy in synthetic fuel is abysmal. It’s a dead end, it loses too much energy. About 80% of the energy is lost in production alone. Nevertheless a huge factory just started producing synthetic diesel in Norway. They use “waste” products from refineries (ingredients as well as pressure/heat) , combined with CO2 (also waste product).
Look at the prices for electricity today. Producing the needed hydrogen alone is a dead in the water duck economically speaking. By then you are only half there to make liquid fuel. Biofuel is much better, much cheaper to produce, and can be produced with no electricity at all. Why some aviation folks are hung up on synthetic fuel is very strange. It’s the sort of thing you do if there is a war, and you have run out of fuel (which is what the Germans did during WWII).
Maoraigh wrote:
The “synthetic” fuel was said to be made using tide or wind generated electricity to extract hydrogen from water and combine it with atmospheric CO2.
Yes, that’s the “clean” synthetic fuel, as opposed to synthetic fuel made from hydrocarbons like coal for instance, or whatever else you can think of. In principle it is as clean as it gets. Clean renewable electricity (solar, wind, hydro) and it extracts carbon (CO2) from the air. Seemingly a win-win situation. When looking a bit below the surface, what is happening is this:
When burning it you produce heat, CO2 and H2O. This means you don’t really extract CO2 from the air, you recycle it in an extremely inefficient way using lots and lots of energy. Then you start out with electric energy, which already is the cleanest and most efficient form of energy man has ever produced. Synthetic fuel is not sustainable because it uses much more energy to produce than you can get out of it by burning it.
Isn’t hydrogen via electrolysis so energy inefficient that it makes sense only on Mars where you have just solar panels and that’s it?
