The Anonymous Widower

Thoughts on Airliners in the Volcanic Dust

As I’ve said before I’m an experienced, although no longer current pilot. I’m also an engineer, who has always been interested in the way planes work and also what causes accidents.

I respect airlines like Lufthansa, British Airways and KLM.  They have excellent safety records and would in my view do nothing rash.  After all, if you took a chance and you had a serious crash, even one without any injuries, your airline would go down the toilet.  So when Lufthansa says that they found no damage after flying through the volcanic dust, I trust their engineers to have checked and checked that there is no damage and their spokesman to be truthful and not put any spin on it.

But these airlines are not the problem, as I believe that all A-list airlines would never do anything that would knowingly compromise safety.  Suppose though that airliners were allowed to be flown in the current state of volcanic dust, but with certain conditions on flight and maintenance rules.  It wouldn’t just apply to the good ones, but to the bad and the ugly too! 

Can governments afford for Air Neck-End to have an accident? 

Of course they can’t!  So they have to legislate not for the best with special rules, but for those airlines that I would never use on grounds of safety.  You’ll probably find that it’s all to do with competition rules and you can’t use safety fears to keep new entrants out of the market.

Let’s also at this point put in a good word for Ryanair.  They have been more than honest with cancelling their schedules for longer than their competitors.  It may be prudent too, so that you don’t have masses of people swilling round the check-in desks. O’Leary is no fool.

But I’m also reminded about a story from Liverpool University.  One of my fellow students came from Derby.  He told how Rolls-Royce bought time-expired chickens to use for testing jet engines.

I hope that large quantities of the volcanic dust are being fired through something like a Trent.

Note that the engine being tested at Derby in the mid-1960s was the RB211, the engine that bankrupted Rolls-Royce.  The Trent is a derivative from that engine and to say it has been successful would be an understatement. The basic design is older than my children.

So we should let the pilots, engineers and air traffic controllers sort this problem out and keep the politicians well out of the way.  And if it means we have different rules for different airlines to satisfy the safety needs, so be it!

April 19, 2010 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Flying, Ryanair, Volcanoes