[Chris Alder]

When will it be safe to fly again? Obviously not Friday as my girlfriends parents flight from London to Las Vegas with virgin has just been cancelled?????

[Sam Jowett]

When will it be safe to fly again? - years/decades given how all those engines up there are sucking it up!

[Dave W]

I suspect its because itll take ages to get staff in and planes in position Chris. As I understand it at first all priority will go to getting planes to fly stranded people back and it may be done by cancelling regular services to free planes up..

[Lightning Hunter]

Quote

Sam Jowett - 20/4/2010 12:49 When will it be safe to fly again? - years/decades given how all those engines up there are sucking it up!

I wouldn't think it'd be much more than months before problems arose, especially with the number of hours they fly each year.

[Sam Jowett]

I don't know Paul... I work for a company that makes the pipe work for jet engines and I can imagine how a glaze of solidified silica in some of those might contribute to allowing the engine to appear ok, but actually be running at slightly wrong pressures, wrong flow rates etc... depends where it gets in to and what part of the engine it directly affects I suppose. I would hope all airlines will be increasing their engine maintenance plans for 10 years or so to accommodate the decision to fly...

[Andy Mayhew]

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Lightning Hunter - 20/4/2010 12:41 I was suprised to look up and see a contrail from a 747 at about 8:45 this morning above Southampton, despite being able to see ash in the sky - maybe they were above the ash?

There isn't any ash.  It's just a computer model.  The airlines said so :P  

[Dave K]

Quote

Lightning Hunter - 20/4/2010 12:51

Quote

Sam Jowett - 20/4/2010 12:49 When will it be safe to fly again? - years/decades given how all those engines up there are sucking it up!

I wouldn't think it'd be much more than months before problems arose, especially with the number of hours they fly each year.

Yes, I can just see that over the next few weeks as flight schedules get back to normal if there are, as we hope, no related incidents or problems (assuming the airlines don't cover up anything hence since it won't be in their interest to make consequent problems public) we will get the outcry of "it was all a big costly fuss over nothing". Of course what we can't know is what would happen had full clearance been given and all flights ran to schedule over the period, especially those short haul flights going back and forth from the UK through the VA two or three times a day.

[skanky]

Aircraft lands with ash on fuselage, apparently no damage to engines.
In Dutch: http://tinyurl.com/y2ee2m8

[Dave W]

Holland, Belgium and France appear to be pretty much ignoring advice and allowing aircraft departures again..

[Paul Sherman]

http://flightaware.com/live/fleet/BAW

10 Inbound BA North American Flights scheduled to land at LHR - But maybe diverted to Glasgow or Prestwick

Paul S

[Andy Mayhew]

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John Mason - 20/4/2010 10:50

Gotta cross-post this one, from elsewhere:

"But the aviation industry wasn't grounded by a volcanic dust cloud. It was grounded by a Met Office mathematical model which said there was a volcanic dust cloud, when there wasn't. Such is our faith in computer models that it was four days before anyone went to look. The only simplification needed to the system is the sacking of the head of the Met Office."

Priceless!! Absolutely priceless!!

Cheers - John

Yeah, that's thanks to rubbish like this oddly anonymous opinion piece in the Telegraph stating:

Quote

The decision was based on a computer model operated by the Meteorological Office's Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, which suggested there was a cloud of ash covering northern Europe. This prompted a warning from the Met Office, which triggered the wider European ban, via Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based air traffic control centre. However, the model is no more than that - a mathematical model. There was no empirical evidence to back up its findings.

:s  

 

[PK2]

Quote

Andy Mayhew - 20/4/2010 14:03

Quote

John Mason - 20/4/2010 10:50

Gotta cross-post this one, from elsewhere:

"But the aviation industry wasn't grounded by a volcanic dust cloud. It was grounded by a Met Office mathematical model which said there was a volcanic dust cloud, when there wasn't. Such is our faith in computer models that it was four days before anyone went to look. The only simplification needed to the system is the sacking of the head of the Met Office."

Priceless!! Absolutely priceless!!

Cheers - John

Yeah, that's thanks to rubbish like this oddly anonymous opinion piece in the Telegraph stating:

Quote

The decision was based on a computer model operated by the Meteorological Office's Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, which suggested there was a cloud of ash covering northern Europe. This prompted a warning from the Met Office, which triggered the wider European ban, via Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based air traffic control centre. However, the model is no more than that - a mathematical model. There was no empirical evidence to back up its findings.

:s  

 

I think it might be MetO bashing "Andrew Orlowski" from The Register who started that @(

[Andy Mayhew]

The Register? As credible as Weekly World News, but no-where near as funny!

[PK2]

Quote

Andy Mayhew - 20/4/2010 14:14

The Register? As credible as Weekly World News, but no-where near as funny!

[hehe] maybe when it comes to stories regarding the MetO, otherwise I used to quite like it for computer based stories :(

[skanky]

I love this bit from the Telegraph article Dave quoted from:

"It is probability rather than actual things happening."

Basically he thinks that if the advice is that there will be a higher probability that the ash cloud will be around, then they should go ahead anyway, as it's only probability.

[Lightning Hunter]

Airliner with contrail has just passed over here, presumably at cruising altitude.

[skanky]

Quote

There are many volcanoes situated near large populated areas in air-travel corridors — Rainier near Seattle, Hood near Portland, Shasta and Lassen Peak in northern California, Vesuvius and the Campi Flegrei near Naples, Fuji near Tokyo, Popocatepetl near Mexico City. We’ve already seen the effect on air travel from smaller and more remote volcanoes than Eyjafjallajökull. Just last year air travel to and from Asia was disrupted by Sarychev Peak in the Kuril Islands — a vital route for freight and passengers to Asia — and again at Redoubt in 2009, another corridor from North America to the Far East over Alaska. Even in southern South America, Chaiten in Chile disrupted much of the air travel across the region for months in 2008 after it began to erupt for the first time in 900 years.

Quote from the bloke who runs the Eruptions blog, as quoted by Revkin at Dot Earth: http://dotearth.blog...-aviation-boom/

There's more so it's worth reading the whole thing.

[Uskys]

Quite a few passing over the beacons, above 30,000' as required? .. I don't know about that!

[PK2]

Not all airlines seem so keen (my emphasis)

Quote

The chief executive of CityJet has said that some airlines have taken risks running test flights through volcanic ash plumes.

Speaking on RTE's News at One, Geoffrey O'Byrne-White said that following these test flights, damage had been caused to some aircraft which had flown in proximity to the ash. He said there was no point conducting test flights unless they were carried out by scientific aircraft.

Mr O'Byrne-White said there had been huge commercial pressure on airlines to get back into the air, and he expressed concern that unreasonable pressure was being placed on the regulators to give way to those commercial needs.

[Dave K]

Quote

Uskys - 20/4/2010 15:39 Quite a few passing over the beacons, above 30,000' as required? .. I don't know about that!

They only have to be above 20 000ft for now.