Um… Katla’s eruptions have been several orders of magnitude short of superanythingness.
Merely piddly little Mt. St. Helens-scale stuff.
Oops, yes, you're right.. Sorry, been doing too much reading on the subject lately, and a few recent news articles have referred to Katla as a 'supervolcano'.. guess it filtered into my consciousness somehow.. As you said, Katla is at least 3 orders of magnitude short of qualifying..
Most games have some sort of paddling-pool-and-water-wings beginning to ease you in: Oolite takes the rather more Darwinian approach of heaving you straight into the ocean, often with a brick or two in your pockets for luck. ~ Disembodied
So far the KLM and Lufthansa flights have deliberately flown into the breaks in the ash cloud or beneath it, to prove that if they're not in it - their aircraft aren't in any danger - hmmm....
A BA 747 has just landed back at Cardiff having flown a big loop, up through and then back down through the cloud, it's been whisked off to the BA hanger for a strip down. They made a big thing about the BA Chairman Willy Walsh being on it - so what - now if he'd put just his family on the plane - then I would have believed that he was sure there was no danger.
There's an old* story (the veracity of which I cannot in any way confirm) that tells the tale of how the Chinese improved the safety for air travelers. After being plagued by several nasty crashes, they simply put it into law that any airline executive above a certain level had to regularly fly in one of their own planes. Problem solved.
*A decade or two, at least.
"Actually this is a common misconception... I do *not* in fact have a lot of time on my hands at all! I just have a very very very very bad sense of priorities."
--Dean C Engelhardt
nor would I know what speed a propeller at it's tips might reach and if the "sandblast effect" would be able to harm it (or the wings).
I only know that at the "beginning" times of RC helicopters folks were sometimes using lead or iron bits in the tips of the rotor blades to adjust against imbalancies. Then they were soon finding their rotor shooting the bits around in most dangerous ways.
Those small RC helicopter rotors with a radius of ~1m and being run at high rpm values at their tips achieved really high speed.
1000 rpm -> ~400km/h.
(Then folks switched to use iron powder)
Though I still don't get why helicopters were not allowed to fly at low altitudes - I read about Kurt Asle Arvesen being stuck on an offshore oil platform because the helicopters were not allowed to fly. Hm.
sticky ash would probably stick to the airship's hull, and bring it down with its weight.
Uhm… you realise we’re not talking about a very dense cloud once you’re 100 km from Iceland, right? Even if it did cling to an airship in surprising amounts, the process would – at the very worst – bring it down slowly.
sticky ash would probably stick to the airship's hull, and bring it down with its weight.
Uhm… you realise we’re not talking about a very dense cloud once you’re 100 km from Iceland, right? Even if it did cling to an airship in surprising amounts, the process would – at the very worst – bring it down slowly.
Oaw man! I've got a nest of people on the brassgoogles forum (steampunk) who have gone into this in fine detail. It comes down to; does plankton cling to a sub hull? No. Same principle less animate.
Oaw man! I've got a nest of people on the brassgoogles forum (steampunk) who have gone into this in fine detail. It comes down to; does plankton cling to a sub hull? No. Same principle less animate.
I could imagine static electricity becoming relevant in the case of a zeppelin flying though a cloud of small glass balls. :-) Anywho, I’ve heard and read a number of people who’ve done actual research saying volcanic ash is not believed to be a problem for piston engines, so we probably only need to revert to 1940s technology.
Sorry, been doing too much reading on the subject lately, and a few recent news articles have referred to Katla as a 'supervolcano'.. guess it filtered into my consciousness somehow.. As you said, Katla is at least 3 orders of magnitude short of qualifying..
