Oolite Bulletins

Ahruman wrote:

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..

DaddyHoggy wrote:

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.

some mad facts and figures here
http://www.popsci.com/environment/galle ... -eruptions

Micha wrote:

Get a standard prop-plane (although you'd probably want upgraded air filters) and it ought to be fine.

I'm not really sure whether you can upgrade air filters in a way to deal with the amount of ashes you're going to encounter on the flight.

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.

should use airships. could probbly use air currents to drift them along until they were clear then use the props.

sticky ash would probably stick to the airship's hull, and bring it down with its weight.

And flying on currents would be probably slower than taking a car or ship.

Sarin wrote:

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.

Ahruman wrote:

Sarin wrote:

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.

ClymAngus wrote:

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.

Dont give the steampunks any ideas

Cmdr James wrote:

Dont give the steampunks any ideas

FEAR MY LIGHTNING ZEPPELIN OF DOOM!

Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!

Mind you it would be kind of nice if someone recreated the Buck Godot stuff for Oolite!

Anyway - it's all moot now - suddenly it's all got better - nothing to do with the badgering from Airline Chief Execs - honest guv'...

As long as they all go to prison forever should an aircraft come down due to the ash.

sticky ash?!


now THAT'S an airship.