While I have skipped a couple of pages because the thread was getting away from me, I would just like to reiterate my Blackwall Tunnel Theory of Authority Mind Set. Its way back in the low nineties somewhere. I suspect that the UK airspace has not been opened because nobody wants to be
the person to say it can.
A couple of observations if I may, or should I say a couple more, because that was the basis of my previous post? The Research equipped Dornier D-CALM flew
one research sorte on Friday was it? SInce when very little has been heard. KLM and LH flew 'test flights' local to their operations on Saturday? And both said they had found little.
BA flew a 747 for about 3 hours or a little over, basically from LHR to their deep maintenance centre in Cardiff, in an aeroplane due, presumably, for a fairly long hour overhaul? WW announced that no damage had been found, which, one has to assume, included borescoping one or more of the engines and, since their boss was standing next to them, no shortage of qualified engineers slowed them up? Am I okay so far?
One of WW main planks recently has been a degree of management honesty. Believe me, I hold British Management generically in much the same regard as I view England Football, so WW is very much an exception! If he was found to be trying to 'blag' his way back in to the air, by lying about the state of those engines, he would lose far more than he gained on
both of his major problems at the moment.
I was concentrating on driving on a prickly, touchy North Circular Road this evening and I may have misunderstood, but I am sure I gained the very strong impression that whatever the Met office and everybody else is basing UK air space closures on, it
is not 'areas of ash have been found'. Because
no ash at all has been
found because there is no-one up there looking for it?
All of the decisions are based on computer modelling? Is that right, some haunted fish tank is guessing where the ash is and hasn't the first idea
how much ash there might be in any given place? Is that right?
Finally, in reply to 'Stagger' many pages ago;
ETOPS certification depends on a documented IFSD rate of less than 0.02 per 1,000 hours. But this exceptional level of reliability was not achieved with engines that were operated in areas of significant volcanic ash exposure for a period of several days or weeks.
The issue I was trying to get at (and that neila83 has explained) is not whether the ash causes immediate IFSDs - but whether engines operated in this environment have an IFSD rate > 0.02 per 1000 in the coming months.
I have a very strong recollection that the two donks on the ETOPS qualifying B777 had been selected because they were the highest flying hour engines anywhere at the time. They had the most wear and were
both further
deliberately unbalanced to emulate poorly maintained, very average engines that might well be found in routine airline service. Is this not so? As an engineer, that's pretty much what I would do, because if the engines passed the ETOPS evaluation, I would get a really nice, warm feeling about those engines.
Roger.