The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has updated its earlier Safety Information Bulletin (SIB) on flight in airspace contaminated with volcanic ash in order to avoid unnecessary airspace closures. Operators are allowed to determine whether or not they would operate in areas of forecast ash contamination, based on their own Volcanic Ash Safety Risk Assessment (VA SRA).
In addition, EASA acknowledged that a database containing up-to-date information on the availability of operators’ VA SRA was largely redundant and not well adapted to the situation of non-EU operators. It said there needed to be more clarity for both EU and non-EU operators on the implementation of the VA SRA principle and therefore decided to discontinue maintaining the VA SRA database and to provide additional clarifications in the new SIB instead.
The new EASA SIB recommends that aircraft should avoid operating in visible or discernible volcanic ash, and that a zoning system should be used to forecast the presence of volcanic ash, depicting areas of low, medium and high concentrations in three altitude bands.