As volcanic ash from the Eyjafjallajokull glacier drifts across Europe, we were struck by the gallows humour of this email, which arrived yesterday from a Crikey reader:
In a previous life I had occasion to see the maintenance report on a British Airways 747 that flew through the plume of an Indonesian volcanic eruption in 1982.
Typically, a 747 maintenance report resembles your common-or-garden telephone white pages in terms of length, readability and overall ability to pique the reader’s interest.
In what can only be described as a classic example of droll understatement and unequivocal brevity, the BA maintenance report consisted of a single piece of paper on which the chief engineer had recommended, “Replace engines 1, 2, 3 and 4.”
It places the annoying inconvenience of air travellers and the financial losses of airlines in a certain kind of simple perspective.
There was talkover at the ABC’s site suggesting that the ash turned to glass inside a NATO F-16 jet engine, and idle office chat that volcanic ash is hugely abrasive and flying through it at 1,000kph was apt to strip the paint right off the plane – and what else ? the aluminium skin ?
That’s possible – Ben Sandilands has pointed out that temperatures inside a jet engine are similar to those inside a volcano. The ash goes in, melts in the combustion chamber, and is deposited as glass on the turbine blades as it cools on the way out.
Dunno about paint but he also reckons it goes a good sand-blasting job on the perspex windows, ruining visibility.