With thousands of airplanes grounded across Europe due to the eruption of a volcano beneath Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier yesterday, we’ve reached out to two GE teams to help explain the danger that volcanic ash presents to jet engines. In the audio clips below, we first get the perspective of GE Aviation’s Leslie McVey, an engineer and one of our commercial flight safety investigators working on everything from bird strikes, to weather events to the rare cases of volcanic ash. We also talked to Narendra Joshi, who works on advanced propulsion systems at GE Global Research, to get a perspective from the lab.
Steer clear: “It just looks like a normal cloud to the crew,” says Leslie about volcanic ash plumes in general. “They can’t tell that it’s ash as opposed to a normal cumulus cloud.” And, as MarketWatch.com notes, when it comes to volcanic ash, “visibility is not the issue, as all aircraft are equipped with systems allowing them to navigate through heavy clouds. The fear is that the tiny particles of rock, glass and sand in the ash could jam engines.” Photo: Icelandic Coast Guard.
As Leslie says about the ash in the audio clip below: “It goes through the combustor and it melts — becomes a liquid — and as it exits the combustor, it starts landing on metal surfaces and re-solidifying.”
Leslie McVey
Narendra Joshi
“Ash can [also] clog up the very fine cooling holes that are used in the turbo-machinery to keep the components cool in a very, very aggressive, hot environment,” says Narendra in the audio clip below. “So if you plug up those holes, then there’s a second level of problems… that will affect the machinery down the road.”
Plane scary: Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull Volcano burst into life for the first time in 190 years on March 20, 2010, according to NASA’s website. This image was acquired on April 4, 2010, by the Advanced Land Imager aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. Photo: NASA.
* See a map of the ash cloud in The Telegraph
* Read CNN’s coverage of the eruption
* Visit NASA’s page on the volcano
* See more photos and maps in The Washington Post