alt Hacker NewsPiston aircraft are vital to training new pilots. Without the piston fleet, you wouldn't have anybody flying anything larger.
Not to mention they're frequently used for air ambulance flights, survey work, and law enforcement. The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.
Also, the current proposed plan is to migrate off of leaded gasoline for most of the country by 2030, which is actually quite ambitious given that acceptable alternative fuels didn't exist until literally a few years ago.
They can run in regular gas reliably enough for training, they can run on jet-a, they can run on batteries. Anything vital can run on jet-a without any barriers.
Excuses are made because it requires retiring or refitting old aircraft, and people need to be forced to do it. Simple as. I will die on this hill.
> The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.
It is not. You're thinking of lidar.