Most airports in the UK and Ireland have been closed or experienced disruptions in the past 24 hours due to another volcanic ash cloud.
\nAt the time of this writing, most airspace had re-opened, except over the Shetland and Orkney Islands.<\/p>\n
Since the initial ash cloud occurrence in the middle of last month, there have been sporadic airspace closures across Europe.<\/p>\n
This is likely to continue, experts say, for months. <\/p>\n
Here in the UK, the disruptions due to this latest cloud, are likely to last into tomorrow.<\/p>\n
The British Transport Secretary said that there are talks about raising the threshold for airspace closures and making airplane engine inspections more intensive.<\/p>\n
Obviously, safety is the biggest priority for everyone, but the airline industry, which lost an estimated $1.7 billion in last month\u2019s chaos is agitating.<\/p>\n
The British Airways chief executive called this round of closures a \u201cgross over-reaction\u201d and Virgin Atlantic\u2019s Richard Branson was quoted as saying that they are \u201cbeyond a joke\u201d.<\/p>\n
The trouble with these clouds is that the particles get into planes\u2019 engines and they turn into a glass-like substance when they come into contact with the heat.<\/p>\n
That causes engines to shut down, planes drop, and they normally recover and re-start engines at lower altitudes, but it is a dangerous scenario. So the criteria for deciding when to close airports has much to do with how much engines can handle.<\/p>\n
But people are worried about a possible summer of disruption. The volcano in Iceland may keep erupting for months, spewing ash into the sky, ash that then gets carried one way or another, depending on the wind. <\/p>\n
The British public has been quite stoic, and at times philosophical about the disruptions. Apparently a wartime Lancaster bomber that had been scheduled to fly over the city yesterday was grounded by the cloud. An airport spokesman was quoted in the Telegraph newspaper as saying, \u201cUnfortunately it seems the ash cloud has managed what the Luftwaffe failed to achieve and kept this marvelous plan out of the sky.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most airports in the UK and Ireland have been closed or experienced disruptions in the past 24 hours due to another volcanic ash cloud. At the time of this writing, most airspace had re-opened, except over the Shetland and Orkney Islands. Since the initial ash cloud occurrence in the middle of last month, there have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}