Bruce absolutely, a boroscope inspection would be more detailed to a point.
But look who is doing the inspection, an entity (BA) who wants to get flying.
Its like this,
Imagine you killed someone and being a judge, you had to convict yourself, would you?
BA wants to fly, of course we all want to fly, but from I can understand of the situation, there are no IMPARTIAL inspections taking place.
The only people keeping it together, are Eurocontrol and the likes.
I just hope they don't back down for the wrong reasons.
What we need are wind changes etc and that volcano to stop belching out this material into the air.
PENKO: your comment about reduced take off etc. Big Difference, there isn't bits of glass melting in the combustion chamber and choking the engine. CAVOK? can you see ash travelling at 800 km/h.
So who would conduct an impartial inspection.. another airline ?
Vested interest in seeing operations commence ?
Manufacturer ?
Vested interest in reducing potential liability claims ?
Government body ?
Like the one that shut down airspace purportedly on one computer model ?
Like the one that doesnt even know what NATS does or that it is not the regulatory body ?
BA, in fact any operator, has about as much interest in seeing a catastrophic even for an aircraft with it's paint on the tail as the CEO would have in putting his balls through an industrial bacon slicer.
I've bough and sold a number of commercial jet engines over the past few years. One, off wing from a 737 had 9 T1 blades melted through, but you know what, the engine still made its EGT's in limits in the test cell.
There are, and always be contaminats in the air, many of these are destructive to engines over time and as such there are TBO limits on blades, disks, hubs, bearings, shafts etc becuase of this.
Shutting down an airspace over an unknown contaminant level, not knowing where it is, or even what levels are acceptable in terms of everyday exposure is simply crass and destructive to the industry.
Is North African airspace shut down due to dust storms which regularly sump sand over the UK ? do other countries which have regular volcanic activity shut down airspace completely?
We have ASHTAM's they should be used.