Ash clouds threaten air traffic

[DjerbaDevil]

VAAC=Volcano Ash Advisory Centres (please note the plural), there are nine of these centres around the world. See URL:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/aviation/vaac/

London VAAC is the smallest of all, only looking after the British Isles and Iceland and is part of the Met Office. Toulouse VAAC looks to be the largest, covering all of continental Europe, Russia, Africa and east to India and most of China.

Assuming they are all coordinated, particularly Toulouse and London VAACs, do they all have the same standards and predict concentration danger levels of VA to aircraft in the same way? From previous posts it would appear that Washington and possibly Montreal VAAC have different standards for measureing the concentration levels of VA and where these relate to be dangerous to aircraft.

According to a press article today (El Pais, Madrid, page 5) VAAC London pass data on the VA concentrations to Eurocontrol and base their predictions on a mathematical formula. Eurocontrol in turn submit the data to the 27 individual State Aviation Authorities, who take individual decisions concerning their own air spaces. The mathematical formula for preparing the data for the predictions is theoretical and has never been tested in real live experiments.........

In the meantime the authorities are thankful to the commercial airlines that have flown aircraft through the VA clouds for their input, as this will help them to determine whether their theoretical mathematical formula could be improved to provide more acurate prediction data....

With the cost of government, local, national and European to the tax payer, Europeans would expect that both VAAC in London and Toulouse would have been provided with sufficient funds to be able to conduct scientifically proved methods to predict the VA clouds and concentrations that would be dangerous to aircraft. The fact that the predictions are based on merely tentative theoretical mathematical formulas is a shameful situation and more so, as it could spell the ruin of many companies, airlines and many many others...

And NOW is the moment to conduct such experiments to find a scientifically based method for predicting the danger levels of concentration of VA cloud to aircraft.

Not in the budget.....never mind, let the politicians in all European countries pay for it, since it's their fault it wasn't done before....