New Tech Helps Pilots Navigate Dangerous Volcanic Ash Plumes

NEWYORK: A volcanic ash detector that attaches to a plane can warn pilots from flying into dangerous particles.

The detector, developed by Nicarnica Aviation in Kjeller, Norway, is undergoing ground-based testing at Iceland's Holuhraun eruption, where it caught toxic volcano tornados spinning in sulfurous gas spewing from the lava.

Researchers said that new technology to detect volcanic ash that threatens airplanes could help prevent a repeat of the air traffic chaos that followed a 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland.

The German Aerospace Center is also upgrading its ash-detection system and its air traffic control methods so that fewer planes will be stuck on the ground if a volcano in Iceland spews ash toward Europe, 'LiveScience' reported.

"The key issue for us is to develop an integrated monitoring and response system for future volcanic crises that can be used to respond quickly in the event of the formation of an ash cloud from Iceland," said Hans Schlager, head of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Center.

Tests of the new technology are being run based on the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, when approximately 100,000 flights had to be cancelled and 10 million passengers were stranded.

The researchers said that if they had employed newly developed models for predicting the complex movement of ash through the air and rejiggered algorithms for rerouting flights around bad weather, they think they could have doubled the number of flights on a single day during the crisis.

Instead of just 5,000 flights on April 17, 2010, around 10,700 flights could have taken place.

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