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Volcano and Flying
08/29/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
Have you ever flown through a cloud? How about an ash cloud from a volcano at 25,000 feet. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, correspondent Amy Mayer takes us to a volcano observatory where having your head in the clouds can lead to disastrous results.
Anybody who's ever flown--be they passenger or pilot--has felt the effects of wind and rain. But volcanic ash from an eruption?
JE: There's a spectacular case of a 747 in December of '89 (flying between) was at about 25,000 feet and located between Anchorage and Fairbanks when it ran into a ash cloud from Redoubt volcano, which was a couple of hundred miles away."
Volcanologist John Eichelberger.
JE: And it lost power in all four engines and came to within a minute of hitting the ground when the pilot was able to restart two of them."
Such a tale explains why the Alaska Volcano Observatory, where Eichelberger works, is in demand when one of the 50 volcanoes in the North Pacific's Aleutian volcanic chain blows.
Volcanoes are highly explosive and they send ash up to flight levels.
Abrasive bits of ash can damage the windshield. More worrisome still are the glassy bits of volcanic rock that return to liquid when they're near the heat of an engine as happened with that 7-4-7. That's where observation comes in.
JE: We can often tell ahead of time when these volcanoes are going to erupt, and we can certainly see, using both ground monitors and satellites when they are erupting, we can tell people when to fly someplace else.
That's John Eichelberger and I'm Amy Mayer.
Amy Mayer comes to us from Fairbanks Alaska, The Weather Notebook is a production of The Mount Washington Observatory and is sponsored generously by Subaru of America and The National Science Foundation. Thanks today go to marketing manager, Melody Nester.
Today's Links
The Alaska Volcano Observatory
http://www.avo.alaska.edu/
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