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Captain Paddy
When I made my comments to you they were more in relation to ongoing eruptions of the Volcano and ongoing periods of airspace closure. Such a situation would be untenable for aviation if passenegers did not know if going on a busiess trip or holiday might not see them back in the UK for days and the Airlines having to pick up the tab for hotels and costs every time. There would be no uniformity of operation and with all the other problems and expense that would incur would infact mean that the airlines might as well be grounded. I take your point that very low levels of Ash would be difficult to see but then are very low levels a hazard? You dont know, I dont Know and as far as I can see the authorities dont really know either. In Alaska the airline has experience of working around volcanic ash. Interesting that they limit flight to daylight so I presume that more is visible to the pilot of threat densities of ash than many have given credence too. But that is the big question! what is a threat density of ash? At the moment the authorities have upped the zero levels a little and I am sure are monitoring what is going on in the field. With the fighters they have only claimed evidence of ash not damage as yet. Fighters spend a lot of time up and down sub 20k while us jet jockies spend most of our time above 20K. Fighters probably have higher IAS low down so maybe more prone to lower levels of ash? Pace |
Nice link.
I think the key part of the whole thing is from 6:00 onwards. For anyone not bothered to listen to it. There was no visible indications of an ash encounter whatsoever. No St Elmo's fire, no signs of abrasion on the fuselage, nothing. Yet $3,000,000 of damage was done. And they were 200 miles away from where the cloud was predicted to be. |
Pace I understand where you are coming from, but I just sincerely hope we're not looking at more cost to the industry in the long run. Engine changes are expensive!!
The RAF have said ash deposits were found in engines. I take your point that they have not said they were damaged, but I really don't see how you could possibly determine that ash accumulated INSIDE the core of a jet engine without having caused any damage. For me, of course damage was done. No brainer. They are hardly going to sweep it out and that be the end of it. What scares me the most is fellow professionals convincing themselves that everything is fine. I suppose it makes us all feel better about going flying this afternoon or tomorrow morning or whatever. Like qualifying the RAF's experience by saying they haven't actually said they suffered damage. (No offence meant at all Pace) Common sense seems to have been lost entirely. As for the visible versus invisible ash question - see ZQA'a link. |
hopefully this one won't be deleted by the mods.
I have just read that the RAF might have a related prob with their "Sentry" a/c operating out of Waddington, three engines on one a/c. Anyone know any more about this |
Overreaction? don't think so.
Flying through volcanic ash is not a good idea. Depending of course on the concentration!
European aviation is regulated by an amalgamation of polyglot officials, penetrated, tested and stretched by national and private enterprises of widely differing standards. Under the circumstances, the regulators have done a reasonable job under pressure from despairing airlines yearning to leap into the air once more! As quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Ken Williams, fleet captain of Alaska Airlines, says that they treat ash clouds with the greatest respect. When Captain Williams receives an alert, aircraft of various types, without passengers, are flown to measure winds and temperatures, providing additional data to be able to map and avoid ash clouds. Alaska pilots are given plenty of simulator practice in dealing with ash. The Alaska Volcano Observatory and the United States Geological Survey make it their business to observe, classify and notify Volcano ash hazards to aviation. Says the USGS, "Volcanic activity threatens safe air travel when finely pulverized glassy abrasive volcanic materiel is explosively erupted into the atmosphere and dispersed ... in flight paths. ... Ash can cause jet engines to fail in flight..." Iceland, as a nation upstream from Europe, frequently suffers from volcanic activity. Now that winds have shifted, its their turn to shut down the airports. Clearly, Europe as a whole will need to sponsor the equivalent of the Alaska Volcano Observatory and the United States Geological Survey as a matter of urgency. Sending test beds full of pax on ETOPs anywhere near ash clouds is not the ideal soluntion. |
As for the visible versus invisible ash question - see ZQA'a link. I did listen to it and the incident report was very interesting. visible versus invisible? Listen to the report again and you will note that his flight and encounter was at NIGHT! Alaskan airlines limited their flights to daytime only which I would also support. At night they would not know what they were flying through. I also noted his referal to NO indications whatsover not even smells which if true would be very worrying. I would also note that while possible that the damage they discovered from this accidental encounter was from the ash, there is nothing that proves it from his report. What I would like to ask you is how would you have treated this possibly ongoing problem without causing major damage to an already strangled industry? all the best ;) Pace |
Posted by The B Word on the Military forum:-
Typhoon's Eurojet EJ200 has a 0.4:1 bypass ratio Boeing 737's CFM-56 has a 5:1 to 6:1 bypass ratio (depending on the variant) Tristar/B747's RB-211 has a 4:1 to 5:1 bypass ratio (depending on the variant) Both can be damaged by contimination (such as sand, ice and ASH!), but the low-bypass-ratio EJ200 is far more likely to suffer damage over the high-bypass-ratio RB211 or CFM-56. The F404s fitted to the F-18C/Ds of the Finnish Air Force (that were also damaged recently) has an even lower bypass-ratio of 0.34:1 |
Iceland volcano - RAF suspends Typhoon flight training ash engine
Some comments about commercial traffic as well. Worth knowing what people are reading. OC619 |
EUROCONTROL just announced that they started a "Volcanic Ash Safety Data Collection Function" in an effort to ensure greater coherence, at a European level, of volcanic ash related flight safety risk assessment and management.
See the link on Skybrary Fly safe, ATCast |
Fresh Safety Information Bulletin from EASA
EASA Airworthiness Directives Publishing Tool |
The forecast for KEF is 110 g27 - should be interesting!
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NATS are an ANSP (the only privately owned ANSP in Europe) and operate on a licence issued by HMG (well CAA). The government are signed up to the ICAO guidance previously refered to in this thread which states ANY ash, no fly. NATS complied with the conditions of the licence and closed the airspace it operates (on behalf of HMG), as did most of the North European ANSPs. The ball was then in governments courts to change the guidance in consultation with various other bodies. This it eventually did once they'd gathered more facts/data and it was then up to HMG to announce the changes. Cynics amongst us may say that HMG hid behind NATS skirts so as to make it appear that NATS were the baddies of the piece and HMG rode the white charger to 'save' the airline industry. In reality everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do. When its comes to things like this its the CEO's responsibility to ensure that a business keeps function and pro-actively prevent a business disaster happening. It seems they collectively decided to avoid the issue. |
I will be happy to stand corrected if it is so proven. Can you direct me to the source of your proof? I would like to check it out. |
Pace:
Quote: Scientists have no standard for what concentration of ash is safe and what is a danger to aircraft, but ash cloud does scatter enough with time and distance to not threaten jets. Fallout from Mount St. Helens actually circled the globe three times before fully dispersing, but flights were grounded only within a couple hundred miles of the source. ... Alaska airlines have been dealing with this and flying for years. They have built up their own operating procedures. ... I am not an engineer or scientist but would have thought specialised engine testing, ground based in a wind tunnel where engines could be run for hours in various concentrations of ash would give a better answer? The amount of known ash types is so wide that it would be commercially not possible to select appropriate representatives for testing. And it would be difficult to extrapolate the results to different ash types without extensive test. And hence the zero allowable ash concentarion directive - simple and effective. Looking from the Alaska experience - they are simple avoiding any ash! OK Europe is smaller so we may have to invent a more creative way - but it may come at a cost. Hopefully just the cost of earlier engine replacement and not a a cost of passenger/crew lives. |
EASA?
Try this:
EASA Airworthiness Directives Publishing Tool and if this isn't a wake-up call to you all, then I'll stay on the ground. |
Have ash/particulate sample screens been suggested as a fit on every aircraft.. Surely weekly checks on such a device, visually at first, presuming several different particle size compartments, would allow a quick estimate of potential engine life reduction and SFC increase to be made, fed back to to engineering depts..
Surely such a device would be fairly simple to design, if not already in airborne service in some applications PS. Excuse and forgive if this has been discussed, it is rare I post without reading the whole thread, but after 50 pages had ot come across such a suggetsion, so have to beg out... and jump forward quickly! |
Yes - this has already been discussed.
No need for extra 'screens'. Any one of several filters on turbine bleeds would do nicely. See my previous posts here and especially over on the Engineers forum 'Ground Procedures for Ash'. ....but NOTHING will happen unless pressure is applied, decisions made, money spent and systems and procedures put in place! That's the danger of discussions such as this. Lots of suggestions but they eventually just slide beneath the waves unless someone, somewhere actually DOES something. (By the way, I have also made contact at CAA...we'll see...) |
Those still believing that VA contamination is just theoretical construct could find the following link useful: Met Office - Icelandic volcano - observations. Near the bottom of the page you can see where and when the test airplanes flew and what they found.
DLR's Falcon made second test flight yesterday, pollution has significantly dropped but there are still doubts whether the area is completely safe. For the time being, report is available in German only. MetAir has been flying its Dimona over Switzerland, I can't find link to their test results, though. |
Has anyone considdered difference of flying into areas where dust concentrations from land erosion, desert dust etc. (silt, sand and other non organic particles)blown up by wind and thermals vs. flying in areas where possible volcanic ash is present.
Dust by definition is 0.1-60 micron, desert dust and volcanic ash particles being blown over long distances are about the same size. Keep in mind that desert dust is eroded volcanic material by origin, look the same under the microscope and share many other properties. I do not reacall the whole airspace in Europe being closed for buisness when the muck from Sahara or elswhere blows in, as happens occasionally each year. As for the ash from Iceland, it might have been localized over small portions of Europe in consentrations considdered unsafe for turbine powered aircraft, but for most of the European airspace particle concentration was by far less than seen during dust storms blowing in from Africa. Enough said, as has been mentioned in this thread before, to eliminate all risk from aviation all aircraft should remain grounded and global transport should turn to alternative means. |
Sorry guys, my long winded post from last night has disappeared so I'll try to keep this one brief.
Pace and mm_flyer (I think that's your user name - your post seems to have been mislaid too) you are both correct about the nightime thing, which I missed. So perhaps the ash would have been visible during daylight but how easily discernable it would have been from cloud reamins open to question. Nonetheless, the fact remains that no other signs of an ash encounter were present. My company keeps harping on about how an actual ash encounter will show signs of abrasion on windshields, leading edges and nav light lenses, but this case proves that to not be the case. Lack of these symptoms does not mean no engine damage has occured. Pace I can't understand how you can question the validity everything in an attempt to justify what has happened? The post strip down examination of the DC8 engiens showed ash deposits in the cooling passages. It was ash - no question. And why would you feel that the report of no other indications of an ash encounter might not be true? The report says that's what happened - why would this not be the case? I see more and more people and professionals qualifying everything to allow the possibility of things not being as they seem. Why is it so hard to see how that same logic could be applied to the new regulations? Clandestinos link is very worrying. Test flights are finding ash out there in sufficient levels to pose the threat of damage. Why are the authorities giving the opposite impression? I do not accept that there would be no airlines left if the regualtions were not changed. This was never going to last that long - although of course it may recur. Some may have run into trouble but most would have survived. Lets be very clear about this: This was an unprecedented occurence where high level winds were sustaining significant ash levels over most of Europe. Volcanoes have been around the whole time jet engines have been strapped to aircraft. When was the last time an ash cloud closed airspace over most of an entire continent? Just once - this last week. Yet we treat it as though the ash was with us for good. That is just not the case. I have a major problem with amending regulations which are designed to prevent the possibility of serious damage or danger from a highly infrequent risk in order to appease business. Since when was the primary objective of safety legislation to ensure the viability of each and every company out there? fireflybob, you bypass ratio infromation is interesting but misses the point. What you say is valid, but only for engines of the same size or thrust rating. A massive high bypass engine needs much more air than a small low bypass one. Also, it can be argued that if ash concentrations were high enough to cause damage to an engine, small or large, then the risk exists for every other engine too. It is the concentration that matters at the end of the day. I see no difference in the operation of military jets compared to civilian ones except for the possibility of different operating temperatures. Even then though, civilian engines are plenty hot enough to cause ash particles to melt. |
Early Right, what you say has been mentioned a number of times iin different places. (Not sure if it on this thread though).
In fact, it is not correct to say that desert dust is from the same origin as volcanic ash. They are created through completely different processes and have very different qualities. Firstly, dust is generally rounded and smooth and also significanlty larger. This means much less or possibly no erosion and abrasion on surfaces. Also, it is generally accepted that the melting point of dust is much higher than temperatures typically found inside a jet engine, so the threat of melting and deposits forming on turbine sections does not exists. Volcanic ash is quite unique in that sense. A comparison with dust storms or similar events is not accurate. |
Once again, the smaller the particle (dust vs sand) the hotter it gets as it passes through the combustor.
The larger the particle (sand and young eruption volcanic stones that haven't fallen to the ground yet) the more likely it is to be centrifuged out the fan duct. Volcanic ash particles often are made up of stuff that melts at temperatures lower than most earth surface dust-sand storms. It's a statistical thing and you manage your way around it finding air clean enough to fly in. |
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In case you missed it, Bang Goes the Theory, episode 5, BBC1 iPlayer did a interview with the D-CALM engineers during the event and an explanation/demonstration of the ash coating of turbine blades.
BBC iPlayer - Bang Goes the Theory: Can You Train Your Brain? |
To amplify another posting re. different engines and different air intake volumes....
A massive high bypass engine needs much more air than a small low bypass one. There's also the question of what percentage of ash particles will get 'centrifuged' into the fan duct and therefore not cause any problems in the core of the engine. Clearly, the smaller the particle, the less energy it will gain as it goes through the fan and therefore the lower the probability it will make it into the duct (assuming it started its journey near the centre of the fan). Particles already towards the circumference will definitely go straight into the duct. .. this is all stuff for the engine builders to measure and calculate when deciding how much ash of what average particle size a particular engine will tolerate. Presumably a somewhat new experience for them now that 'zero ash' has been declared an unachievable aspiration in European airspace. :) And potentially at least, REALLY fine ash will pass through the cooling plenum, through the blade passages and out the cooling holes without causing a blockage??? Tricky stuff! The average ash particle size is also determined by the age of the plume and, crucially, by how much water / ice is left in the caldera of the volcano. If a lot of water gets in amongst the outflowing lava and flashes to steam, this produces a semi-explosive eruption (the special name was mentioned earlier but I can't relocate it) and much finer ash. Now the eruption has been going for a while, presumably the ash particles are bigger on average and therefore will fall out of the plume faster?.... Someone who knows about volcanoes, please put me right on this..... |
On HIGNFY Andy Hamilton suggests we need a jet engine which can cough.
We already have, it's called a pulse-jet. Sod fitting a RAT, have a drop down pulse-jet instead! :} |
I made it back to LHR as rebooked on BA on Friday 23rd, on the daylight flight from Boston. My fears of unbridled applause on touchdown at Heathrow were a great exaggeration. There was none.
Many large official notices at passport control in Heathrow that "there are long delays here today due to Volcanic Ash". This just seemed a ridiclous excuse. There were indeed large queues, but as we all know Heathrow is normally at full runway capacity, and there is therefore little scope for additional flights. Load factors seem little different, and there are stories of some flights very lightly loaded. There also seemed proportionately less overseas visitors than normal compared to UK residents (very few Americans in the flight from Boston), so they will be easier to process. No, the main reason for the long queue at T5 seemed that a large number of immigration desks on the right hand side were unstaffed. So it seems that many UK residents have been stuck overseas, some in desperate circumstances, but the Home Office staff can in no way organise overtime or similar arrangements to speed their flow. After all, it's not as if they have been rushed off their feet in the last week, is it ? Let us move on from the world of the bureaucrats to real engineering. As we cruised along I was looking at the various dirt marks back across the wing. Now if there is any impact of ash in the atmosphere this must surely show up in additional external dirt accumulation, and the need for additional demineralised cleaning of airframe exteriors. Has anyone noticed the need for this ? |
brooksjg, sorry but that's just not the case. A high bypass engine will of course have alot of air going through the fan and ash here is unlikely to do anything other than abrade the leading edges of each fan blade. But my point is that even a large 777 engine needs vast amounts of air going thourgh the engine core, in order to produce power, in order to drive the fan!!! It doesn't get it's power from anywhere else! Power comes from the core, but the majority of the thrust comes from the fan. You're confusing the two. This core airflow will unquestionably exceed the air requirement of a small low bypass miltary engine.
There is no "centrifuging" of air in a turbine engine. Unless you consider free turbine engines which generally use a centrifugal compressor, but then these have no bypass! Centrifuging in a bypass jet engine just does not occur! I can't comment on very fine ash and it's likelihood of blocking cooling passages, but ash also contaminates oil systems and breaches bearing seals, etc, etc. This risk must surely increase with finer ash.... |
captainpaddy
There is no "centrifuging" of air in a turbine engine. Unless you consider free turbine engines which generally use a centrifugal compressor, but then these have no bypass! Centrifuging in a bypass jet engine just does not occur! |
Virgin's Branson attacks volcano cloud shutdown...
From the AFP wire....
LONDON: Richard Branson, the boss of airline Virgin Atlantic, Saturday hit out at the decision to ground flights due to volcanic ash from Iceland, saying there had been "no danger at all to flying". Branson also called on Britain's government to pay compensation to airlines, who have been left at least 1.7 billion dollars (1.3 billion euros) out of pocket, according to the airline industry umbrella body International Air Transport Association (IATA). "This was very much a government decision to ground the planes and we would suggest that the government should compensate the industry," Branson said in London. "Behind the scenes, our engineers and all the experts were telling us that there was no danger at all to flying and that the danger would have been if we had flown close to Iceland through the volcano." He added there were "plenty of corridors" which airlines could have flown through and said: "I think the government has accepted that there was overreaction. "A blanket ban of the whole of Europe was not the right decision." Clouds of ash from an Icelandic volcano caused a week of massive disruption and left hundreds of thousands of travellers stranded as many European countries closed their airspace, only reopening earlier this week. Virgin Atlantic says its flying programme has returned to schedule but that a small number of flights could still be delayed because of the knock-on effects of the shutdown. - AFP/jy |
What Branson is saying is just... funny.
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Says it all Really:
:ugh: Volcanic ash too hot for politicians • Rob Lyons • From: The Australian • April 24, 2010 12:00AM IS that it? After six days of a near shutdown of the skies over northern Europe, the British government announced British airspace would reopen at 10pm on Tuesday, local time. Now that things are getting back to something like normal, it is time to learn some lessons from the whole mad affair. What does it say about contemporary society that it is grounded by a relatively small, distant volcano? The answer lies in a mixture of precaution, organisational cowardice and a negative attitude towards flying. When flights were brought to a halt on April 15, it appeared that the ash would be a temporary inconvenience with flights quickly resuming. However, over the subsequent 24 hours it became clear that the cloud could hang around for days, if not weeks. We were the victims, we were told, of a peculiar combination of volcanic activity and weather patterns. Flying, we were assured, was simply too risky. The proof was to be found in the startling experiences of a British Airways flight over Indonesia in 1982 and a KLM flight over Alaska in 1989. On both occasions, aeroplanes flew through clouds of volcanic ash; all four engines on each aeroplane stopped working and the pilots were forced to descend thousands of feet before being able to restart the engines. For those involved, the experiences must have been terrifying. But there seems to have been too little effort to understand how the situation over the past few days may have been very different from those earlier incidents. For example, the KLM flight was a mere 240km from the volcano in question, Mount Redoubt, while London's Heathrow airport is 1900km from the volcano in Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier. While neither the British Airways nor the KLM crew knew immediately what was going on, the cabin filled with the smell of sulphur and what appeared to be cigarette smoke. When the British Airways plane landed, the windscreen of the aircraft was so sandblasted that the pilots could not see out well enough to taxi the plane and it had to be towed off the runway. KLM, Lufthansa, Air France and British Airways reported nothing like that during test flights last weekend. This would suggest that the concentrations of ash particles in those earlier incidents were far higher than have been found over Europe in recent days. Yet even in those two most notable examples, the engines of the planes all restarted at lower altitudes and the planes landed safely, even if it was touch and go for a while. So, in 2010, hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost to the travel industry, hundreds of thousands of people have been stranded and imports of perishable goods have been badly affected - all to avoid a scenario that has never cost a single life. As one writer noted, if we took a similar approach to driving, our motorways would be full of cars pootling along at 50km/h. Yet many commentators have ridiculed airlines for questioning the restrictions. Gathering the available evidence is certainly sensible, but the expert worship in this instance is misplaced. Someone whose expertise is meteorology or vulcanology may well be able to measure particle concentrations in the atmosphere and make some educated guesses about how those concentrations might change. But it is highly unlikely that the same expert can tell us anything definitive about whether those concentrations will damage a jet engine. Is it really mad to suggest that the airlines, whose reputations after all would be on the line if they got it wrong, might have some useful insights into whether flying is safe or not? Other commentators have offered what they seem to think is an inspired argument: if critics of this safety-first approach are so certain, they should take part in a test flight. The fact that airline bosses like BA's Willie Walsh and KLM's Peter Hartman did that last weekend seems to have passed such insightful wits by. We also need to be aware that experts don't necessarily have a brilliant track record on estimating risk in the face of uncertainty. For example, in the 1990s there were claims that hundreds of thousands of people could die from the human form of mad cow disease (BSE). In truth, there have been 168 deaths from variant Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), but 1139 deaths from the long-standing form of the disease in the same period (such a tiny rate of incidence that some have called the BSE-CJD link into question). As Frank Furedi notes, from the Millennium Bug to influenza, experts have provided apocalyptic scenarios of what might happen and governments have been very willing to act upon them. This is symptomatic of a contemporary problem with political leadership. In recent years, responsibility for making decisions has been increasingly farmed out to independent experts. These decisions are designed to make sure politicians can't be held responsible if things go wrong. "It wasn't us, guv, it was the experts wot did it. We were just following advice." Which does rather raise the question of why we elect leaders in the first place. Such reliance on experts is not helpful. Just as the vulcanologist cannot tell us much, if anything, about jet engines, so it is not the place of experts, no matter how eminent, to make policy. Scientists, engineers and aviation officials can all bring their knowledge to the table but it is elected officials who must decide how to balance the risks and the benefits of a situation like flying through an ash cloud. The promotion of experts allows our supposed leaders off the hook. So British Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis could say yesterday: "It's fair to say that we have been too cautious." "We" being the international safety regulators. The only thing that might drown out the noise of jet engines in the next few days is the sound of the buck being passed. Unfortunately for all those affected, the politicians have gone missing. Oliticians fail to take decisions on an important matter, and blame others for not giving them the right information. It is over-caution combined with cowardice dressed up as outsourcing. For six days there was political paralysis in the face of this natural event. The notion of "no safe threshold" for atmospheric ash particles was clung to even when test flights conducted by the airlines suggested it was not true. And there appeared to be positive rejoicing at the absence of planes from our skies. Far from there being desperation to get transport working normally, to release people stuck in departure lounges or stuck thousands of kilometres from home, flying was treated as an optional extra, something that society could happily do without. It was not a volcano that brought sections of society to a standstill: it was political disorientation, the application of the precautionary principle, and a cavalier attitude among the elite towards the value of flying in the first place. Spiked |
responsibility for making decisions has been increasingly farmed out to independent experts. Ironic that experts are the airlines themselves who set the safe level they so objected to. CEO's who complain AFTER a well know, serious, threat to their business occurs are incompetent. I do not want politicians making important technical descisons, especially about safety, because they are unqualified, incapable and biased towards making the unsafe choice. If it was a political decision the airspace would have re-opened within hours against all advice. |
A north-easterly with snow at KEF to break the gloom, but forecast back to 'volcano wind' later. I see Astraeus, like Icelandair, are operating from AEY.
All seems quiet on the eruption front - is it lack of interest by the media or is it less active? Anyone up norf to comment? The latest I can find from the Met Office is Friday "Eruptions from Eyjafjallajökull are continuing periodically with debris being emitted into the atmosphere. Weather patterns over the next few days mean that any new areas of ash will be mainly blown away from the UK." |
Originally Posted by peter we
(Post 5657129)
Ironic that experts are the airlines themselves who set the safe level they so objected to.
CEO's who complain AFTER a well know, serious, threat to their business occurs are incompetent. I do not want politicians making important technical descisons, especially about safety, because they are unqualified, incapable and biased towards making the unsafe choice. If it was a political decision the airspace would have re-opened within hours against all advice. BD |
All seems quiet on the eruption front - is it lack of interest by the media or is it less active? Anyone up norf to comment? The latest I can find from the Met Office is Friday Met Office: Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres |
Ta Bamra - 2.5km I see. Anyone any current pics?
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The Met Office started from the premise that any VA is dangerous to jet engines, therefore the presence of any VA must mandate a total ban on aviation.
In any cubic metre of air anywhere on the face of the Earth, there will be a small amout of VA, therefore no aviation must take place anywhere. QED I'm afraid this is the kind of expertise we have in the UK today. That other countries still hold the UK in high scientific regard is surely on the momentum of a former glory? Many scientific degrees from some provincial universities are 'cheap' acadmically, and deliberately avoid some of the challenging, yet absolutely critical concepts. Such is the political apetite for 'inclusive' and 'accessible' education that public sector organisations are encouraged to promote and engage such minor graduates. It comes therefore as no surprise that absurd deductions such as these are published with no peer review and little consultation amongst the real experts of the piece, those who live and work in the atmosphere everyday, and craft their trade around it. Still worse, the aviation community in general, and pilots in particular are dogmatically sidelined as natural class enemies and polluters of the planet, wholly anathema to the Islington wine bar clique of champagne socialism. Thank heavens for the CEO of Big and his uncompromising and confrontational style, which every other day would be directed at us, but in this instance pricked the bubble of stasis, and dragged the Alice in Wonderland world of sofa to armchair cabinet government, its unelected peers, and its cosy mates in Brighton Poly, unceremoniously into the real world. http://www.reallyfabcards.com/media/...G_195780_S.jpg |
And now the Media Turn
The ash cloud that never was: How volcanic plume over UK was only a twentieth of safe-flying limit and blunders led to lock-down | Mail Online
What a strange world we live in. The Media who panicked everyone with selective publishing have now made a U turn the other way :ugh: I think many of us are loosing confidence in the science when literally every forecast world disaster has turned to nothing. The media called for governements to destroy millions of birds over bird flu. 65000 deaths predicted over the mexican flu (345 actual) And now this I hope the airlines do sue Pace |
I would not consider anything printed in the Mail to have much relation to the truth
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