@itsresidualmate:
you wrote:
With the amount of civil air flights and the number of inspections we're doing I find it hard to believe that the threat is as real as the CAA/EASA/Government make out. Where's the evidence of contamination? Have no engineers found problems? To ground flights there must surely be a current danger to aircraft, I just don't believe there is. Of course flying through a volcanic plume will probably ruin your day, but flying around hundreds of miles away when it's dispersed? Maybe some accelerated wear and tear but the plane ain't going to fall out the sky!
I agree with you on this, itsresidualmate.
petitb wrote:
"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."
Would this by any chance be the result of not flying through ash, in other words the restrictions are working ?
Even though I also believe that authorities have overreacted, I have to agree with petitb that the fact that no damage (or ash) has been found, proves absolutely nothing. Your argument does indeed resemble very much the elephant scaring crystal in our garden, I'm afraid.
As Pace has stated before: a better argument is that there's never been an incident outside of ash concentrations visible to the naked eye. (Or would have been visible in daylight VMC) (Anybody reading this: pls don't bring back the NASA DC8 case again
)
Best regards,
Sabenaboy