Military aircraft do not have the necessary sensors. Cranfield, however, does, and has been flying.....
This is just the beginning, warn scientists
.....Yesterday a British scientist described how even modern aircraft technology cannot detect the clouds of ash. Guy Gratton, head of Cranfield University’s facility for airborne atmospheric measurement, took a flight with fellow researchers to gather data.
“Speaking as an aeronautical engineer, I would not want to be putting an airliner up there at the moment,” said Gratton.
“There is a lot of fairly nasty stuff there that we were running away from, knowing what we did. We have standard airline instruments on the aeroplane, we have got a storm scope and we have got a weather radar and they were looking straight through it."
"Neither of those were seeing any of this stuff. It was only our specialist cloud physics instruments that were able to see the particles.”