Leaded fuel is still used in piston airplanes everywhere. While there are ongoing efforts to develop an unleaded alternative, there is none currently available to the market.
There are already multiple unleaded aviation fuels in testing, and one (G100UL) commercially available. The main barrier is that the engines, especially larger and older ones, are not designed to run on unleaded fuel, and must be certified.
Right, hopefully G100UL can replace 100LL reasonably quickly, but there's a big difference between "commercially available" and actually available. I imagine it will be quite some time until it's commonplace for GA aircraft, unfortunately.
It's not even business - a lot of small planes are just hobbyists. So we're getting poisoned (to say nothing of the noise pollution) by people flying in circles for fun
I wonder if we'll ever come to a time when we can get the vroom vroom crowd to put down their poisoning toys, something tells me our species is fucked because they're never going to stop.
we have an air show here in Seattle every summer where the navy burns tens of thousands of gallons to VROOM f-18s around the lake.
I'm prior service, I'm not anti-military extremist, but do we really need to dump tens of thousands of gallons of gas into the summer (already shitty) air quality and the CO2 it becomes after combustion? for 'patriotism'?
Logically, no, but god forbid you take away the circuses from people, even if it's hurting their communities.