British Airports have been closed, after a Massive cloud of ash from a Vulcano in Iceland driffted into UK Airspace.
Full Report: Sky News.
I am lucky if I remember to turn the camera on and remove the lens cap!!!!, but I have a go.
All Stanstead and Heathrow flights are suspended from 12 in anticipation of this Volcanic ash...one of the more unusual reasons for flight delays .
Sure beats striking staff members anyway...
AirSpace - more than just hot air
This Vulcano when "Fired" up, releases ash into the atmosphere intermittently, for up to two Years !
Taken from radarvirtual.com
Shows how much trouble a volcanic eruption can bring.
UK airspace is now closed until after 6pm at the earliest.
Presumably, some investigators into the extent to which a particular volcanic dust cloud can affect aviation would like to get close enough to the periphery of a dust cloud in an aircraft and take samples - without ingesting enough dust to damage or stop their own engines. Would a pulse jet fitted to a suitable pilotless drone fill the bill here? A pulse jet would probably keep going until the fuel-air mixture was no longer able to ignite...
Time to raid the Imperial War Museum for the blueprints of the V1 motor?
It appears to me that a large part of the problem is that engine manufacturers are stating ‘no amount of volcanic ash is safe to fly through’ and the authorities are blindly accepting that statement, despite that fact that it’s clearly the advice of a lawyer, and not an engineer.
After Mount St Helens, the ash spread all the way around the planet and was detectable for two years, during which time we were all flying through it, whether we knew it or not. I wonder what levels of ash occurred over Europe after St Helens?
There would appear therefore to be a level of ash at which there is no significant effect on aircraft, then there must be a higher level which would incur increased maintenance costs and obviously a higher level again at which operations start to become unsafe.
The blanket ban on flight in ash is the work of a badly informed person – we fly in ash every day, all over the world.