Few days ago the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud completely paralyzed the European airlines companies for several days, grounding mainly all the aircrafts in Western Europe, blocking all around the world people who wanted to get back home or traveled over Europe for winning business opportunity in the rest of the World. It will maybe happen again as we never know with volcano behavior, maybe not this volcano but its neighbor.
With this big mess in the skies created by one Iceland volcan ashes cloud, it is maybe time for engineers to:
- either rethink the design of aircraft engines for being less sensitive to any ash/cloud and being greener by mitigate their own pollution/carbon footprint at the same time,
- or think to increase the fundings for designing and developing new type of aircraft propulsion systems using different concept such as the MHD-gas (MagnetoHydroDynamic in ionized gas) and the Coandã effect or the WIG (Wing In Ground) concept or both.
Soviet Union/Russia during the Cold War (and maybe recently China in Qingdao naval base) has developped and built some weird birds, huge birds using the WIG concepts named Ekranoplanes. One of them was famous and was called the Monster of the Caspian Sea.
In the Tom Clancy’s novel and also the movie “The Hunt for Red October”, the most advanced Russian nuclear submarine is using MHD concept as Stealth propulsion technologies.
Design and manufacture a new sustainable Ekranoplane or Avrocar is one of the solution against Eyjafjallajökull and others or really invest in a technology such as the MHD and Coandã effect (as the French physician Jean-Pierre Petit did with his MHD Aerodynes).
more ekranoplane pictures here and there
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