Shinmoedake

Bubba and Duane are repairing a neighborhood sidewalk. From nowhere, two small kids run crashing through the wet cement and disappear. Bubba says, "Duane, them kids is much cuter in the abstract than in the concrete!"

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

The Shinmoedake Volcano I wrote about yesterday, while exciting in the abstract, was underwhelming in the concrete. But I get ahead of myself.

I am sitting in the Sheraton Hong Kong Hotel & Towers in Kowloon as I write. We flew 11.9 hours in N575FE along this track.

As you can see, we went right by Shinmoedake. We decided to add more fuel during flight planning because we weren't real sure what the volcano was going to do and - as the old aviation saw goes - the only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire. There were several mechanical issues to resolve before we could push back and taxi at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, so it wasn't until well after level off at 32000' that I could finally contact our Global Operations Center on ACARS and find out about the volcano.

I wasn't very worried as there were plenty of places to land short of the volcano and over eight hours until we would be in Japanese Airspace. The report we got back was a densely packed page of Volcanology code. You will thank me that I do not post it here. It took us some time to figure it out - but we finally got the coordinates of Shinmoedake loaded in the nav computer and determined that the ash was only reported up to 25000' above Mean Sea Level. As we were planned to be at 38000' by that spot, I quit worrying.

As a side note - Shinmoedake is probably pronounced "Sheen Mo Ay Da Kay". Please recall that Japanese does not place emphasis on any syllable. Just rap it out like a machine gun. As a reminder, Shinmoedake lies in Fukuoka Control's Airspace. ( That's Foo Ko Ka - settle down there Beavis. )

In the hotel room here, I learned some more about the volcano. First, here is an interactive link to google maps to orient you to the volcano.

View Larger Map

The big round caldera between Mount Kirishima and the '1' is Shinmoedake. If it looks familiar to you, it should. It was the site of the underground lair of Ernst Blofeld, the evil madman that "Bond, James Bond" defeated in "You Only Live Twice."

Here is another link with some pretty cool pictures.

Now for the pictures I took. Gentle Reader, please recall that I said 'underwhelming.' These pictures are taken from many miles away with a little hand held point and shoot and shot looking into the sun.

The whole island of Kyushu was totally undercast with thick clouds. We never saw the ground or the ocean again after just south of Tokyo. Clouds from above on a brilliant sunny day are a very bright white. We could see a darker gray smudge on the horizon about 100 miles north of Shinmoedake.

As we got closer, the smudge started to resolve itself and you could see that the ash cloud was hitting equilibrium with the cool air and topping out just above the clouds. The cloud tops are roughly 20,000' and we are at 38,000 - or roughly 4 miles up and 7 miles up respectively.

This last picture is as we passed west of the volcano at the closest point. I think this is what you are seeing. Up at our altitude we were deep in the core of the jet stream. The wind was blowing 180 knots - roughly 200 mph - from right to left. The wind was less down at the level of the ash plume but I think it was still generally right to left. If you look, just right of the anvil shaped dark gray cloud there are smaller, 'bubblier' gray clouds. I think those are the most recent eruptions to break through the clouds and they are still climbing up. They will make another anvil shaped cloud later. The anvil shaped flat cloud is the ash that has climbed to it's highest altitude and leveled. I'm guessing that Shinmoedake itself is further to the right under the clouds.

Were I silly enough to descend down and fly into that ash, it would score paint from the airplane, pit the windscreen and most importantly foul and flameout the engines. I liked being offset 20 miles or so west and 3 miles up from this thing.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

ps, It was really hard to find a starting quote for this post.