Great news, man! Is he coming out of Lajes Field in the Azores? That's pretty far south of the Portuguese mainland, IIRC.

Something else I've been wondering, can't find an answer anywhere:

Is there some technical reason jets can't just fly at a lower altitude then the ash cloud? It has something to do with 'cruise altitude' and engines being less fuel efficient in a denser atmosphere, right?

Yeah, low-alt flying eats a LOT of fuel; can't go nearly as fast, either, since you're dealing with much denser air.

Also, it's a much rougher ride for the same reason, which is not only uncomfortable for passengers but not good for the aircraft structurally. There are also potential noise-abatement issues over populated areas; the engines have to be on a higher throttle setting to maintain airspeed.

Balloons and dirigibles would be mostly unaffected though right? Or propeller planes....

Weird how I'm thinking of all these alternate modes of transport; it's funny how something as tiny as a dust particle can grind an entire continent to a halt, when a hundred years ago most people wouldn't have noticed this at all!
All our amazing technology still pales to nature's every whim, whether on Earth, in it's skies, or beyond

I'd better stop, I'm getting scarily close to being poetic here!

Actually, most airliner-sized prop planes use turboprop engines, meaning that they're driven by small jet engines, so the ash ingestion problem for engine compressor blades still would apply. However, they fly at lower altitudes (possibly below the most concentrated areas of ash) & they're slower, of course, so the leading edges of the wings wouldn't be eroded as much. They might well tolerate these conditions better than "real" jets.

Yeah, it is funny how new technologies always encounter new challenges. 150 years ago, the worst solar storms could only mess up telegraphs; today, they can royally screw up not only a variety of vital satellite-based services, but also take out power grids!

I wonder why they can't fly out from LHR at, say 8,000, get west of Ireland then accelerate up to M.81 and FL350 from there. I understand the need for safety first, but it does seem a little bit like they've thrown their hands up and said "Ok - Volcano - you win" rather than trying every possible route in and out in the mean time.

I'm sure that's possible to do within the limits of fuel consumption rates for many models of aircraft, Doug. Think that the blanket ban is an abundance of caution in the name of safety, though. The UK civil aviation authorities apparently don't want to take a chance that even one plane will get itself into a dangerous situation be it from ash ingestion or trying to hop the Atlantic with a minimal fuel reserve.

As a pilot friend of mine once told me, the average 747 flight taking off from London to New York has NEARLY enough fuel..... to get half way back

Like I said...an abundance of caution!

As you might have guessed, I got a war story for this, though. There I was, flying to Norfolk, VA from Rota, Spain aboard a C-141 in the mid-90s. We were about halfway across the pond, and I was up in the cockpit trying to get at least one of the plane's two HF radios working; damn things both decided to quit at once, and the -141 didn't have any sort of SATCOM at the time, so we were pretty much cut off from the world.

All of a sudden, the red "cabin pressure" light came on, and both of the pilots immediately put on their O2 masks; according to the gauge, we were losing pressure pretty rapidly. We were @ FL360 or so, and they immediately began to descend to 10,000 ft. so that the rest of us could keep breathing. The aircraft commander told me to grab the loadmaster & try to find & plug the leak, since we didn't have enough fuel to reach North America or turn back to Europe at that point if we had to stay below FL010!

So, I went downstairs & told the loadmaster what was going on. He said he'd felt a pop near the restroom, so we checked there first. As soon as we opened the door, we felt a breeze; the toilet tank seal had apparently popped off, and all our air was blasting out through the commode! (It was very fortunate that nobody happened to be sitting on it when this happened; that would have left one hell of a mark!) So, we grabbed some blankets & pillows & stuffed them into the john, then poured a bunch of water over it all. The water eventually froze somewhere down in the mess & finally stopped the leak; we climbed back up to cruise altitude & made it to Norfolk. (I even fixed the radios!)

So, yeah: I fully support abundant caution when it comes to aviation. You never know what's gonna happen at decidedly inconvenient times!

That reminds me of the Marx Brothers line in "Monkey Business" - something along the lines of, "We fly all the way across the Atlantic and we are just about to land when, maybe one foot from the runway, when what do you know? We run out of gas, so we have to go back."

FYI, my son made it back home to Ft. Bragg last night! I haven't had the chance to debrief him on his final flight path and waypoints. The important thing is that the plane made it to Bragg with him on board!

That's FL100.

Hey, you're ruining the story, Tesh!

(You're right!)

Not ruined Nicolas, it's a nice one! I flew on Transall C160 so didn't have this kind of troubles (not talking about John's) since FL never get THAT high.
I went to Berlin at the time of THE WALL (I remember very well seing it from the sky while landing) and the corridor was so narrow that volcanoes ashes would have been a BIG problem.

Some pretty impressive volcano eruption pix in this person's flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredrikholm/s...57623722362673/
("Evacuation" with the horses is really impressive)

Today's APOD is a pretty impressive pic of the volcano.