brooksjg

One factor in your favour - apparently still 'scheduled'
But two potentially against:
- The southern edge of a Black ash area is predicted to move Eastwards, VERY close to LGW between now and 1200.
- There are no arrivals into LGW at the moment, so if the aircraft in question is not already there, the Boss ain't moving, until 1800 at earliest.

Cameronian

Thank you, booksjg - I'm guessing you are addressing me.... It appears that the mods have deleted my query and Charley B´s reply.

Bertie Thruster

Curiously the latest midday ash notam now shows no sign of the no fly black zone that was over England this morning! (Wonder what will happen to the VAAC graphics at midday?)

itsresidualmate

So far I've not found any evidence of ash damage in all the aircraft I've inspected (northern european regional routes). I've asked a lot of my colleagues in other airlines if they've found any evidence of ash damage or if they've heard of it being found :- Nothing. Not one engineer I've contacted has found or known of anyone finding damage. Now I don't claim to know every engineer in Europe, but it does seem that ash damage is thin on the ground (or the blades). I think that any maintenence cost saving from not flying is going to be dwarfed by the loss of revenue.

MPN11

Live on BBC ... all restrictions at LGW and LHR have been lifted.

sabenaboy

Very strange. I would have thought they'd have to keep it closed.

green granite

Quite a few flights overhead here in North Beds at about 10 to 15K, thought it was strange having looked at the Met office charts earlier.

Perrin

I know this is a pilots forums but being a retired engineer after looking after you lot for 40 some years I feel I can ask a question on this forum.
Why is Ryanair always first to cancel so many flights out of Prestwick and other airports?

Take care out there, Peter

MPN11

The Beeb was suggesting that wind had swung to the SW earlier than expected.

RoyHudd

Those scary charts are 6-hourly PREDICTIONS, not actuals. Man cannot live by predictions alone.

itwasme

Latest chart just issued:

sabenaboy

The latest charts look like this. Strange that predictions change so quickly. Or would there be someting else going on?

Bertie Thruster

If you look closely at the 0600 chart, in post 2883, you can see the lower black zone is a coffee stain from the forecasters mug.

MPN11

The chart is in fact a Rorchsach Blot test to determine how you voted at the last Election. If you look very closely, you can see a silhouette of Gordon Brown leaving No 10.

Right, time for my pills

SLFguy

What have you started - I can see a wild boar rearing up out of Europe.


I guess you also saw a bore.

brooksjg

Errrr - the 1200 chart shows that the Black area that extended South virtually to LGW up to 0600 this morning (and was predicted to hang around until tomorrow at earliest) has now moved (VERY) rapidly North and shrunk a lot, so the southern boundary now runs through central Scotland.

This is crazy! Clearly the VA cloud could not really move at anything like that rate between 0600 and 1200 the same day, even in gale-force southerlies (which we ain't got anyway). Furthermore, the behaviour of VA clouds does not include ash suddenly falling to earth, which is the only other simple explanation for the change.

So what's going on? Reworking of the modelling software? Redefinition of the input data (which was perhaps overly pessimistic up until this morning) or duff / very fast-changing (??) weather / mass airflow data?

You tell me!

Until it's clear how this change suddenly occurred, it seems that VACC forecasting has a bit of a credibility gap to fill (and maybe plenty of spare ash to fill it with!).

IB4138

Possibly because G-LUXE has been flying a volcano ash patrol this morning and hasn't found ash where the computer previously said there was.

If so, were all the airport closures in the last 24 hours based on duff info?

brooksjg

But previous research flights took place on Saturday (??) which (presumably) confirmed what was being forecast then! Very odd

Facelookbovvered

Its a good question "why do Ryanair seem to cancel first" i can only assume that they make more or lose less by bunching people on to subsequent flights? plus many will simply not bother to reclaim their money and a lot of tickets will have been sold at below cost in what is a shoulder period, for sure you can bet they wont have done it to increase their costs.

If you had two aircraft flying with say a 130 paxs and half were on "sale" tickets you could probably improve the yield by flying the next day with one full aircraft.

B-HKD

The computer simulations their are creating suck because they are using PC's and not Mac's