Posted by Jorgen on Sunday, April 18, 2010 @ 03:52 PM:
Hi Guys,
as you probably heard the Icelandic volcano Eyafjallajökull spewed out an ashcloud that grounded pretty much all airtraffic in Europe the last few days. I would therefore like to report from my commuter fligth last Thursday (Swedish Airspace (south region) shut down at 1600 UTC that Thursday). Flying back from work at flight level 0,5 at 1500 UTC I did not encounter any unusual St Elmo´s fire or opaqueness of the canopy. Engine performance was unaltered (although I shut down for half an hour to exploit an unusually perky thermal at the edge of the control zone with engine off climb of 2,5 m/s) and unfortunately no grit-blasting effect on leading edge surfaces at all could be found- I had to rub those damned bugs off just as usual!
A British Airways flight in 1982 did not have the same experience:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWDU8XRQ_GY&feature=related
I think a Zenith carb being designed for tractor use would probably cope just fine with some dust, and gliderpilots tend to like dust devils, don't they? What was unusual this Thursday though apart from little intervening IFR traffic was the few still airborne IFR flights radiotraffic- no one knew what was going on, if they were really permitted to fly, when everything would shut down and were they would be stranded by then.
In light of Icelands current precarious financial situation the joke of the day in UK is Gordon Brown sending a cable to Iceland: "-We said: send us your CASH- that's with a C!"
May the 4's be with you/ Jörgen
