Ashes To Ashes, Dust To Dust
If you have even been around an Air Force flight line you would have seen a truck that had the letters “FOD” on the sides. It is a trash truck used to get rid of anything that doesn’t belong on the flight line to prevent “Foreign Object Damage”. Jet engines are very large vacuum cleaners that tend to fail when they suck up things like birds, rocks, or enough dust. One of the possible causes of the recent CV-22 crash is the dust kicked up by the engine exhaust as the aircraft was landing. You don’t knowingly fly a jet into a dust storm.
When the BBC reported that Europe’s airlines and airports question flight bans, it was obvious to me that these people were thinking about the effect of the flight ban on their bottom line, without considering the effect of losing an aircraft and hundreds of people.
The airlines said they had flown test flights and there were no problems, which is interesting in light of the fact that the ABC reported Fighter jet engines suffer volcano damage from test flights.
No planes crashed, but when the F-16 engines used by the military were examined, FOD, volcanic glass, was found. They have to replace the engines and send the ones that were used in the test flights back to a depot for cleaning, inspection, and testing. If damaged, the titanium blades used in jet engine turbines can fly off like knife blades piercing the fuselage and anyone inside. Of course they might just destroy themselves in a fiery explosion.
Here’s an .ogg file of the pronunciation of Eyjafjallajökull. The name is actually a portmanteau: Eyja – island, Fjalla – mountain, Jökull – glacier, so you could just call it the Island Mountain Glacier volcano.
If you want to make the attempt: EY is pronounced as a long A, like EI in “weigh”. J is pronounced like a Y. The LL is closest to TL in English, as in “title”. The Ö is a long O, like “yoke”. The U is a long U, like “blue”. The A’s are short, like “ah”. This gives you: “ei-yah-fyat-la-YO-kutl”, or “the volcano in Iceland”.
5 comments
You pronounce it for us, Bryan. I’ll pass: my tongue, which served me so well over decades of woodwind-playing, including all those complicated tongue patterns from the 17th and 18th centuries, suffers a classic case of ankyloglossia; indeed, the photo in the wiki might as well be of my tongue. Even Spanish is a problem for me, as is German. (Sigh.) Maybe in my next lifetime…
Flying jets into foreign objects, including volcanic ash and dust, is just insane. I hope none of us is obliged to fly in Europe until this is over.
thanks for the [written] pronunciation key. i know there are sound files all over the internet, but the cats have turned my latest pair of speakers into a cat toy [again], so i’ve unplugged them and put them away to keep them from being destroyed until i can figure out a[nother] way to cat-proof them.
,i>The airlines said they had flown test flights and there were no problems, which is interesting in light of the fact that the ABC reported Fighter jet engines suffer volcano damage from test flights.
interesting as in the test flights didn’t fall out of the sky, so everything is hunky dory [just don’t look under the hood]? the tsa may just have done a bunch of us all a favor by making flying such a hassle that at least we’re spared the thrill of falling out of the sky in a poorly maintained plane.
Steve, if you can speak English, you have almost every sound that is available in verbal communications. It is a melding of Germanic, Romance, and Gaelic roots, with a dabble of everything else thrown in. The key is to get as close as you can, so you can be understood, not to sound like a native speaker. Who in their right mind would assume that the perfectly good “S” in “island” isn’t pronounced in English?
Hipparchia, I don’t trust airlines to know the real risks in flying. They seem to feel that they can get away with shortcuts and taking chances as they price themselves out of their market.
F16’s typically fly a bit faster than airliners, with correspondingly higher pressures involved in their engines. Still, I’d be interested to see whether the airlines bothered actually doing a teardown of the engine of their “test” flights.
Frankly, at this point I’d board an ocean liner and spend a few weeks crossing the Atlantic rather than board one of those flying death traps they call “airliners” today. The only time I reluctantly board one of the things is if my job requires it or if I have to visit my relatives back in Louisiana, otherwise it’s horseless carriage for me.
– Badtux the Luddite Penguin
There is only one sure way of checking for engine damage and that’s pulling them apart to check each stage. Military maintenance does it all the time and is able to do a lot of it right on the flight line. The airlines have maintenance facilities that should be able to do a tear down to the same level.
That the military found it almost immediately means they could see it with their fiber-optic scopes in the first stage or by crawling into the intake with a flash light. SOP says the engine is red-lined for depot and replaced as a critical air safety hazard. In combat they would clear what they could see and do a ground test to stress the engine. but that requires everyone to sign off on it. Aircraft are expensive and destroying one in testing is considered very bad form.
I just don’t trust the airlines or the inspectors who are supposed to be protecting the public.