Airborne volcanic ash is such a rare threat to air travel that no one's bothered to invest the time, effort, and money to develop an ash-proof aircraft engine.
I'd be interested to hear the ideas of some aviation engineers as to how you would design such an engine. They'd have to invent a whole new air filtration technology to keep the ash out of the intakes.
And ash in the engines isn't the only problem. At the speeds that jet liners travel, airborne ash can scour the paint right off the airframe and pit the windshields so badly that they turn white.
It can also incapacitate the aircraft's instruments, which also blinds the pilots.
Lotta stuff to overcome, there.
Well, we flew to the moon for some reason. Part of the rationale for that was we’d get some great technological advances just in the doing.
I’m not advocating government spending, but volcanos are forseeable. I understand why private industry might not want to design aircraft for that contingency, but since the government does seem to waste money, we’re looking at something that some government might want to look into spending money on. Skip the global warming bs. Global warming is good. If it gets 1 degree hotter, and a volcano makes it 1 degree cooler, it’s all good.
The space shuttle is fairly sturdy, can any technologies be taken from that?