Quite a few T-55 Chinook engines as well..

…and using it to spread the `Scientology` message in Haiti 😉

You know you are doing pretty well when you can afford to run a 707, you know you are doing realy well when you can park it out side your house.

I wonder if he has a windscreen sticker saying my other aircraft is a Gulfstream?

RAF Turnhouse used to be very accomodating to ATC cadets. I hitched there a couple of times from Newcastle in the 1950s and there were always lots of interesting things to see. Happy memories,
Jim

RAF Turnhouse used to be very accomodating full stop.

As a junior spotter in the late 60s we used to wander in through the gates (telling the very occasional guard we were going to the Edinburgh Flying Club) and then go into the hangar to check the visiting aircraft log book to see what had been in. Did anybody ever throw us out? Of course not.

Want to sit in the chippie lads? No problem!

Here’s an interesting report over on AvWeb about an incident in 2000 when the NASA DC-8-72 inadvertantly flew through a volcanic ash cloud.

http://www.avweb.com/pdf/volcanic_ash_cloud_encounter_nasa_grindle.pdf

Note also that AvWeb reports that:

Shifting winds gave North America a taste of what Europeans have been enduring for five days as volcanic ash reached the easternmost point of the continent, canceling flights from the Newfoundland and Labrador capital of St. John’s. At least nine flights were cancelled in a precautionary move by airlines. Transport Canada has not imposed airspace restrictions but a spokesman told CBC News they’re a possibility of the department believes safety is at risk.

Flight training on RAF Typhoon jets was “temporarily suspended” today after safety inspectors found deposits of ash in one of the fleet’s engines, the Ministry of Defence said.

Safety inspectors took the “precautionary measure” to check all of the jets based at RAF Coningsby, in Lincolnshire, after finding small deposits yesterday.

A spokesman added: “These are very high performance jets so they are just being extra cautious.”

The government has come under criticism from airlines for shutting down UK airspace, so it may feel vindicated by the the MoD’s decision.

The ash was found on one of the jets which landed at the base yesterday,” the spokesman said. “They were flying as normal yesterday.”

The seven Typhoons that were flying yesterday are being checked by engineers. The MoD, however, said the ash would not affect operations, specifically the two Typhoons on Quick Reaction Alert status, ready to scramble immediately in the event of a suspected terrorist hijacking of a civilian airliner.Tornado and Harriers are also flying. The Typhoon training flights have been affected as the plane is a new “high performance aircraft”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/22/raf-flight-training-suspended-ash

Flight training on RAF Typhoon jets has been “temporarily suspended” after inspectors found deposits of ash in one of the fleet’s engines, the Ministry of Defence said today.

Terms and conditions.
When book you confirm you agree to them.
That is legally binding and pretty rock solid.
You can fight it, but it will cost you far more in legal bills than you would ever gain.

Whilst he probably realised that EU law takes precedence over company contractual terms and conditions, he’s not paying compensation, just reimbursing expenditure against receipts.

A scientific rebuttal..?

I know this is a bit long, but is an editorial from the Research Fortnight comic we get in our office.
————————————————-
Where safety and risk assessment are concerned, a policy maker’s place is in the wrong. Everyone in the UK, it appears, knows someone becalmed by the Icelandic volcano. Several members of our own staff are stranded, waiting to return to homes and work. All of us are hanging on the latest expert commentary. Will the volcano continue to be active? Where next for the ash cloud? What risks to the health of both humans as well as Rolls Royce areo engines?

One additional question we have been asking ourselves is whether science should be working rather harder to either predict these events or, at the very least, tell us whether it is or isn’t safe to fly a plane through a volcanic dust cloud.

As ever, the answers are not simple and the stakes are high. Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association, said the past week’s air space closures were costing airlines “at least USD200 million a day” in lost revenue. British Airways, which carried out a test flight through the murk on Monday afternoon with no mishap, puts its losses at between £15m and £20m a day.

At issue is whether the blanket closure was justified, or whether as IATA suggests, risk assessments could have been used to allow some flights to take off at various times in the volcanic plume allowed.

The IATA is posturing, because its members are losing money. Bisignani called for the European air-navigation safety organisation, EUROCONTROL, to establish a centre that would coordinate decisions on volcanoes that affect aviation.

He must know, surely, such a body exists. The London Volcanic Ash and Aviation Centre is one of nine such centres created by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. Its job is to track ash clouds from eruptions and notify aircraft so that they can avoid these clouds. It couldn’t be, could it, that the impotent IATA knows everything that can be done is being done but feels the need, nevertheless, to look as if it’s protesting on behalf of its members?

IATA also criticised what it derisively calls Europe’s “unique methodology” of closing airspace based on computer modelling of an ash cloud. Computer models, while never perfect, are the best method we have. How else does IATA suggest these decisions should be taken?

The models try to forecast the location and movement of ash clouds and on the whole are pretty good. They take into account variables such as plume height, the volcano’s eruption rate, duration, and the fraction of volcanic fragments with a particle size below 63 microns.

Models can also assess the impact of dust particles striking a body 800 km/h. They depend on the temperature of the particle, its corrosiveness and the shape of what it hits. Some of this data is available from direct observation, some not, so modellers have to include data based on historical knowledge of the particular erupting volcano. The difficulty with Iceland’s Eyjafjallöjokull is that such data is very thin.

No technology can guarantee whether a dust plume is totally safe. Stranded passengers are not the result of a failure of policy, nor of a lack of government commitment to the vulcanology community. They are stuck because stuff happens. Once in a while it does us no harm to acknowledge the limits to our technology to describe a problem, never mind do much about it.