Discovery News Tech's very own Clark Boyd was stuck in London that week, thanks to the eruption.
Ash clouds can do some serious damage to planes, and here are the pictures to prove it. As a temporary solution during the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, pilots were able to slice and dice their way through gaps in the ash clouds, but that solution was hardly ideal. They had to fly that way because planes could not effectively detect the levels of volcanic ash in the air to see if it was safe to fly.
But that could change. Researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU) have developed a volcanic ash detector that could allow airplanes to safety navigate around potentially dangerous ash clouds.
The system uses infrared cameras mounted on the plane's tail wings. Data from those cameras gets sent to flight control centers, to allow ground staff to build a detailed 3D map of the volcanic ash cloud.
It allows planes to detect ash
clouds more than 60 miles away, between altitudes of 5,000 and 50,000
feet. It's a technology with an acronym so clever, you almost think
they spent as much time working on that as developing the actual
technology: Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and
Detector (AVOID).
The first test flights will take place in eight weeks on easyJet planes, a British budget airline.
Photo: EasyJet
Tags: Aviation, Electronics, Safety and Prevention, Sensors
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