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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Holy moly that can't be good for you. Pollution levels near a highway are really bad. Under an airstrip? Egads. Don't little planes use leaded fuel?
Piston planes do, turbine planes don't. Unfortunately for small single engine planes, piston is still a lot more common and quite a bit cheaper than turboprops, though just like with airliners before, turboprops is (very) slowly becoming the norm for general aviation as well.
∆ This guy planes ∆
Thanks for the insight.
Even if aircraft are worse, I'd be curious how traffic factors in. Even a moderately busy highway would have several orders of magnitude more traffic than this community airstrip, I would imagine.
Do people fly for like, a trip to the grocery store? To work? Or is it for Sunday joyrides and the odd out of town trip?
I'm not an expert on pollution, but leaded fuel is extremely nasty stuff. There's a pretty substantial correlation between a big drop in violent crime and the ban on leaded fuel.
Here is a Forbes article... Mostly because it was the first to come up.
That is one of the most brutal claims of correlation I've ever seen, those two graphs are offset by 23 years.
Edit: not disputing leaded gas is bad for you, it for sure is.
The theory is that lead is extremely bad for developing minds. Hence the roughly 20 year offset. Kids exposed to it grew up to be a little nastier. Fully formed minds aren't as susceptible.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I'd be shocked if breathing in lead wasn't really really bad.
Lead is really bad for you.
But you've now made the leap from correlation to causation on what was already an incredibly shaky premise.
They are distinct concepts. We can agree that lead is bad for you without trying to bring murder rates into it.