Re: New Scientist report on VA in engines
Looks like someone at New Scientist has caught the Bureaucratic Disease causing mental 'tunnel vision'. Ex Cathedra view on testing engines: 'destructive testing across a range of them will be incredibly expensive'. Yes - it would. IF you took brand-new engines straight off the line, put them in a test cell and trashed them. But that wouldn't be a valid test anyway! What you need is a tired engine that's (presumably) most vulnerable to VA ingestion, due to the crud from other sources that's already in there! So if you start your testing programme using engines that are already due for scrap or major rebuilds, cost will start to unwind. Seems obvious to me.....
And why bother taking engines off the aircraft for testing? Now we have a higher floor-limit for ash concentration (4000 microgrammes) and a max dwell time, it would be a simple matter (very low actual risk and low cost) to take empty aircraft already due for engine-removal on a short tour round Iceland, having first borescoped the engines to re-confirm starting state of the HP turbine section. OK - maybe not ultra-precise and full of exhaustive scientific perfection and rigour - but at least enough 'first principles' data to guide next research steps, if any required. Why not?