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Iceland Raises Volcano Aviation Alert Again
An anonymous reader writes Iceland's authorities have raised an aviation warning for a region close to the Bardarbunga volcano after a small fissure eruption in the area. The eruption began around 0600 GMT prompting the Icelandic Met Office to raise the aviation warning code to red for the Bardarbunga/Holuhraun area, the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said in a statement. The country's meteorological agency described the eruption as a "very calm lava eruption and can hardly be seen on seismometers."
This can affect a lot of planes flying to and from Europe, and can cost airlines millions of dollars in cancellations, delays, and rerouted flights. However it is imperative that airlines avoid the area as ash can wreak havoc on a jet engine and its turbine blades. Best case scenario is the engine flames out and can be restarted once the ash cloud is exited; worst case is that it cannot be restarted and if you lose multiple engines you might wind up losing the aircraft.
Frankly, I'm shocked that Iceland extends pilots licenses to volcanoes. That seems like a terrible idea.
Who did what now?
In light of the incidents with Eyjafjallajökull and Bardarbunga, I wonder if it would be possible to issue trade embargos on words longer than 10 characters to limit the prevalence of these volcanoes.
This is wrong on all counts. It is very much traditional for us Icelanders (yes I'm from Iceland) to transliterate eth (ð) as d and accented characters like á without the accent.
Th is only used to transliterate the thorn (which Slashdot refuses to render).
What is annoying is when the eth is transliterated as o. I have one in my last name and I've had trouble with checking in to flights booked via Expedia due to this nonsense.
The character you have in mind is 'thorn'. If we had Unicode, betcha we could do one.