“We sent ten Boeing 747 and Airbus 340 jets on transfer flights from Munich to Frankfurt,” Lufthansa spokesman Klaus Walther told the paper. The planes were moved in order to be in the most useful place once the ban is lifted, he explained.
“Our machines flew to a height of 24,000 feet, or around 8,000 metres. In Frankfurt the machines were examined by our technicians. They didn’t find the slightest scratch on the cockpit windscreens, on the outer skin nor in the engines.”
“The flight ban, which is completely based on computer calculations, is causing economic damage in the billions. This is why, for the future, we demand that dependable measurements must be available before a flight ban is imposed.”
Source: “the Local”
At left: the model from the Met Office used to look at dispersion.
The Nuclear Accident Model (NAME) was originally developed after the nuclear accident in 1986 at Chernobyl, which highlighted the need for a capability to predict the spread and deposition of radioactive material released into the atmosphere. The model has continued to be developed and is now applied to a wide range of atmospheric pollution problems, ranging from emergency responses to daily air-quality forecasts.
Over the years, NAME has been applied to a number of atmospheric releases, including radioactive releases, the Kuwaiti oil fires, major industrial fires and chemical spills, and two major volcanic eruptions that occurred in Iceland. Both of these eruptions resulted in aircraft having to be re-routed to avoid potentially dangerous ash clouds. An example of the volcanic ash guidance provided to the aviation community is shown in Figure 1.
Source: NWP Gazette
Here is what Professor Jerom Ravetz of Oxford has to say about the issue (via email):
Interim contribution to the Post-Normal Science debate.
Considering the effects of the Icelandic volcano on air transport, we seem to have:
- Facts Uncertain: how thin must the dust be, for it to be safe enough for flying?
- Values in Dispute: Regulators wanting safety at all costs, others needing to get flying now.
- Stakes High: Crippling costs to industry, versus big risks to aircraft and people.
- Decisions Urgent: Every day the immediate costs mount, and the long-term costs grow.
Is this analysis an invitation to scientists to cheat? Some of my critics would say so, and perhaps even some of my supporters as well!
h/t to WUWT readers Nigel Brereton and Bernd Felsche
Air France/KLM, Lufthansa & BA have all flown tests with no damage.
You want ZERO risk flying? Don’t fly!
I’ve seen multiple bird-strikes, who could model that?
The evidence is that there is insufficient ash to be a problem, it’s a matter of detectability.
Previous incidents have shown sand-blasting of wind-screens & significant leading edge & compressor damage, these are not in evidence.
This is a storm in a tea-cup & another symptom of our elfin safety society.
Would I fly? YES
DaveE.
Re: LarryD (14:27:19) :
“A perfect mission for an telemetry instrumented UAV. An umanned, flying probe. Anybody have any?”
You’d have to take the Hellfire’s off first…
Met Office
Europe Infrared satellite animation which is updated every hour.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/satpics/latest_VIS.html
British Isles: Infrared satellite animation
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/satpics/latest_uk_ir.html
Icelandic volcano imagery
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/volcano/gallery.html
Real-time satellite
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/europe/volcano/iceland.html
Terra/MODIS is having hardware problems but a great look at sea ice
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2010109/
“Please note: Due to heavy web traffic, the normal site is currently offline. This is a holding page to provide updates on the Icelandic volcanic eruption. ”
“Statement on Icelandic volcanic eruption: Monday April 19, 2200
Since our last statement at 1530 today, the volcano eruption in Iceland has strengthened and a new ash cloud is spreading south and east towards the UK. This demonstrates the dynamic and rapidly changing conditions in which we are working.
Latest information from the Met Office shows that the situation is worsening in some areas. Based on this information, the situation for Northern Irish airports for the morning is uncertain, due to the new ash cloud. The latest information shows that Scottish airports should be available from 0700 and more airspace over England may become available from 1300 although not as far south as the main London airports.
We will continue to monitor Met Office information and the situation is likely to change overnight. We will make a further statement at approximately 0300 (local time), tomorrow, Tuesday 20 April and again at 0900 (local time).”
http://www.nats.co.uk/
Excellent photos of Eyjafjallajokull from Marco Fulle
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http://www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli/perm/iceland/icons-eya-20100416/ejafjalla16apr2010-mfulle4145j.jpg
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http://www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli/perm/iceland/icons-eya-20100416/ejafjalla16apr2010-mfulle4143j.jpg
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http://www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli/perm/iceland/icons-eya-20100416/ejafjalla16apr2010-mfulle4136j.jpg
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http://www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli/perm/iceland/icons-eya-20100416/ejafjalla16apr2010-mfulle4142j.jpg
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http://www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli/perm/iceland/icons-eya-20100416/ejafjalla18apr2010-mfulle4289j.jpg
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http://www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli/perm/iceland/icons-eya-20100416/ejafjalla18apr2010-mfulle4290j.jpg
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from this link
http://www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli/
Egad I hate what the alarmists have done to my cynicism threshold. Now I,m waiting for a peer rev. Paper that tells us that the volcano and the grounding of flights have stopped agw and they will be forecasting cold weather over the next few years bsed on their models. Already there has been a few allusions to the 9\11 grounging of flights ushering in cooler weather in this post.
My problem with some of the use of precautionary principles, is that analysis paralysis overwhelms normal decision making.
The groundings may have been acceptable initially but the modelling should have been tested real world immediately. The agencies should have been testing, not sitting behind a computer screen.
Our aircraft fly in some of the most extreme weather conditions nature can throw up, day in day out. They fly and divert around major storms and so on.
Conspiracy is yelled when business operators do what the agenicies should do. Test the computer based theory against reality in real time.
Then a real life and death decision can be made, scientifically and at arms length to conflict of interest.
Aaargh.
“Ric Werme (15:18:00):
Oh come on. We already had one lame hoax post in this thread. If it were a satellite in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) it would be above the horizon for only 15 minutes or so. If it were in geosynchronous orbit it would be way too faint to see during the day … I don’t think there is an Earth orbit that would leave a satellite visible for an hour over London. ”
Me and a friend spotted it and observed the satellite for an hour. We saw it move in a straight line at first, then it stopped in place for 15 mins, then it moved across to the left and again stopped for 30 mins in one place. In the photo I posted that’s when it made it’s first stop. Each move was around 20 degree arc of the sky and took less than a minute to complete that distance. There’s nothing except satellites which can make such manoeuvres and UFOs don’t count. Yes, it was very faint but you can see satellites with your naked eye during the day if sunlight is reflecting off them and the sky is very clear.
James Sexton;
I’ll restate, even given a month or two(regardless of the urgency), the science wouldn’t be anymore reliable than the models. They could give us probablys, and shoulds, but that’s all.>>
OK, wear analysis 101.
1. Visual inspection of all parts by qualified technicians during disassembly.
2. Fluid samples for all working systems (hydraulics, lubrication, etc) sent for spectrographic analysis to identify existance of microscopic contaminants. Number of labs that can do this is enormous. There is one in every Caterpillar dealership world wide for example. Turn around is usually 24 hours.
3. Fluid samples for all working systems sent for ferrographic analysis. Fewer labs do this, but turn around is usually 48 hours or less. Detects all abnormal wear particles from surfaces in contact with the fluids and frequently identifies root cause (ash imbedded in journal bearings for example). This can be done with grease as well, andf the presence of ash in any of the fluids will be identified. (Particles larger than 10 microns or so may be missed by spectrographic analysis, but ferrography captures everything up to several hundred microns)
4. All parts exposed to air or which are working surfaces are sent to metallurgy labs for a variety of tests. These include tests for the existance of micro-fractures not visible to the naked eye, and microscopic inspection for abnormal wear. A large number of labs exist which do this work normally, particularly in areas with aerospace or automotive industries. Turn around is typically longer, but in consideration of the gravity of the situation you should be able to get results in 72 hours.
5. Any abnormal wear is noted and evaluated to determine effect on the lifetime of the part via standard engineering wear analysis procedures, preferably in conjunction with the design engineers and the original manufacturer.
6. Its Friday. You have the results. Make a decision.
Seriously, this is tedious and and detailed work, but there is no real “research” here. These are tested and reliable methods that are used every day by many many many manufacturers to estimate lifetime of parts, reduce wear and failure, and by industry for predictive maintenance. Nothing earth shattering.
Unless of course PNS gets involved in which case people with no expertise will make urgent decisions out of an abundance of caution and decide that the risks are too great because the science is uncertain and ban air travel until all the volcanos have been dormant for a minimum of two years. PNS isn’t about doing the science right. It is about creating excuses for not doing the science and making decisions without it. That’s how shuttles get blown up. That’s how blood letters get to be medical practitioners. That’s why there are no virgins in Denmark, they’ve heard how you stop volcanoes from erupting. PNS isn’t how you put guidelines in place for “our less ethical friends”. PNS is how our less ethical friends get to justify pushing their decisions upon the rest of us.
I said Denmark, I meant Iceland. No virgins in Iceland. Lot’s in Denmark though, they are are rowing over from Iceland in boats.
Much earlier (2010-04-16), in tips, I wrote:
Bernd Felsche (09:04:58) :
A closing down of ALL UK airports doesn’t seem justified, looking at the images published by the UK Met Office’s VAAC http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/aviation/vaac/vaacuk_vag.html
Scotland and Northern Ireland appear to be clear for the most part. Atlantic flights could use e.g. Glasgow if alternates in Ireland such as Dublin are acceptable.
Or doesn’t anybody trust the Met Office?
————–
Apparently too much and the consequences of their incompetence have been vastly under-estimated.
RajKapoor (08:20:17) :
Biography:
RKapoor (born 4 September 1952) is an Indian Bollywood actor, film producer and director.
Source: Wikipedia
Has Raj brought the industry to its knees?
This whole shut-down was based upon MET models?
There have been eruptions going on around the world for years and planes negotiated their way around them. If proper air samples had been collected, instead of looking only at models, this total cessation of air transport over Europe may have been needed only until there was a clear picture of what was up there, rather than a blanket order to stop all travel.
The disruption to trade with countries that rely upon it has been enormous.
Anthony might like to do a post on what Michael (13:33:37) put up.
An elephant weighs about 3000Kg. At 70Kg per human and 35 elephants (microbes in the oceans actually) each, the elephants out mass us by 1500 to one. As a first cut assume the biological metabolic rate of the ocean organisms is the same as people and even if people through technological activity put out 20 times as waste product as microbes per unit mass that still means we are out activitied by 75 to 1.
Might put our impact on the planet in perspective.
davidmhoffer (19:04:53) :
“I said Denmark, I meant Iceland. No virgins in Iceland. Lot’s in Denmark though, they are are rowing over from Iceland in boats.”
lmao…..that’s a hoot!!!
On the other subject, IDK, it seems, whatever methodology, it’s worked. A couple of days stranded, people are on the go now. No jets crashing and burning nor people. I understand you’re view. On your last point, “6. Its Friday. You have the results. Make a decision.” It’s always going to be a judgment call and someone has to make it. Regardless of the process employed or the results in hand.
It just seems to me, traditional science let us down in regards to the CAGW scare. Whether the alarmist crowd employed PNS or not, the rest of the scientific world was deafening mute during most of the debate. Only now are we hearing from the more traditional scientific community and it’s still just a murmur. I agree, in a perfect world and in a vacuum, science should operate in a more traditional manner. It doesn’t today, it won’t tomorrow. The CAGW scare exemplifies the way it will go if something doesn’t change. We can no longer simply accept on face value the words “scientists say…”.
A new methodology will be employed. I truly hope the one that is, asks the question, “Is this analysis an invitation to scientists to cheat? “
Well at least we have a preview of cost of what total Green will do to the Airlines and assosciated economies: $200M / day.
3rd world countries can now line up to pick up some fancy jets at the next EU garage sale.
wondering when will the cloud obliterrate the sunshine over the United States from coast-to-coast, cooling our summer into a bummer?
http://achilliad.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/volcanic-ashes-to-ashes-friends-to-dust/
Chow.
Nuff
As an airline pilot, I think in this case that the situation is not overrated. The classic ash scenario that we practice for in the sim for loss of thrust from both engines, this is a dire emergency. That’s easy. The problem faced here is extremely problematic and frustrating as the danger is not as apparent or clear cut.
As It is true that we don’t really know what an acceptable level of ash is for turbofan/prop ops then we don’t really know what level of threat we are dealing with.
I doubt that sampling the air is going to yield reliable data on its own. We need to be fairly certain that huge areas of interconnected airspace are ash free. Clearly as it would be very difficult to visually identify the ash cloud (impossible at night) then operational pilot observations cannot be used as a means of assessment either. Neither can weather radars detect ash. The computer model is probably the best tool we have coupled with air samples with test flights over time. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/volcano/arsf/
The reality is that have no idea of the impact of light ash on insidious factors such as the subsequent performance of the airplane. An apparently safe flight might result being unable to restart on the turnaround or even a total hull loss simply because the aircraft couldn’t generate enough thrust to get airborne for the return leg. Perhaps, the pitot/static system later malfunctions. Perhaps one or more crew become incapacitated.
In terms of cost, a 747 requiring four new engines would be an aircraft grounded for a week and probably $2m for each engine. And that is if it is fortunate enough to be at an engineering base. Imagine the impact on an airline that has 50% of its fleet grounded.
The risk to people and businesses is real and quantifiable. Unfortunately, unlike other risks that airlines and pilots deal with on daily basis, there is very little that can be done to mitigate said risks other than to be certain where the ask isn’t and allow flights only in that airspace.
James Sexton;
It just seems to me, traditional science let us down in regards to the CAGW scare. Whether the alarmist crowd employed PNS or not, the rest of the scientific world was deafening mute during most of the debate. Only now are we hearing from the more traditional scientific community and it’s still just a murmur.>>
On this point, I must agree with you. I do business with a lot of researchers and I long have noticed a reluctance for one discipline to level criticism against another. Each seems to expect that the others are self policing. Physicists will tear each other to shreds over a minor point, but they don’t tend to call chemists out for making a mistake, they leave that to other chemists and so on and so forth. When climate science managed to exclude dissent from within their own ranks, a consensus formed that other disciplines were reluctant to challenge until most recently, and, as you have pointed out, it is still just a murmur.
I don’t see PNS as the solution, I see it as the problem. When the bulk of research is both funded by public money and also informs public policy (which directs more public money) a vicious circle begins. Political interests see the opportunity to advance their agenda and the scientists become pressured to deliver supporting results to fuel it (and maintain their funding). Read the Climategate emails, it is pretty evident. I believe the acquisition of data and the analysis need to be completely separate endeavours by completely different groups of people. When you have a single researcher doing both, the opportunity for cherry picking and biased analysis is just too difficult to reverse engineer and expose… even for a scientist from another discipline. Researching the Sun? That’s different. But on something like climate where the research feeds back into policy, stronger measures are required.
Does anyone remember this eruption? Where were all the scare stories surrounding this event? All the recent scare shit surrounding the Iceland eruption is for a reason. It’s to continue scaring the shit out of you and keep you living in fear.
Montserrat Volcano 1-7-07 2 Days Before Evacuation
ScientistForTruth (16:25:35) :
That is more or less my point. The Met Office computer modeled ash cloud does not include any information on concentrations. The actual concentrations within the real cloud is very likely varied.
Obviously there is a lower limit below which it is safe to operate.
Until the cloud maps include information on concentrations, the safe approach must be to stay out of the cloud.
“Are you unaware of the video showing the black plumes of smoke coming from the area of an O-ring on the right SRB *while still on the launch pad* ?”
A leak which, if I remember correctly, then sealed itself either due to O-ring movement or junk filling the gap until it reopened again later in the flight due to the stresses of wind-shear. I believe that’s supported by trajectory, thrust vectoring and pressure data during the flight; a persistent leak would affect all of those.
While NASA should never have ignored the SRB engineers, the Challenger crew really did get quite unlucky that day.
Back on topic, the fundamental problem is that if some burrowcrat says that it’s safe to fly and a plane crashes, they lose their job and may even go to jail. If they say it’s not safe to fly, then there’s no risk; if they get sued for causing airlines to go out of business, they just say they were relying on the best scientific advice available and throw the Met office to the wolves.
The only valid use of the zero-tolerance principle, IMO, is for the use of zero-tolerance in any real world application. Whenever I see the phrase “zero-tolerance” in a medical paper, I immediately cease reading the paper under the assumption that the author is either an idiot or innumerate. Zero has a very clear mathematical meaning which people seem to have difficulty grasping. I’m confronted with the desire for zero-risk on at least a weekly basis where a patient won’t take a drug unless I assure them there is zero-risk of side effects. Of course this is impossible for me to do and I think I’ve caused patients anxiety when I ask them if they’re worried about suffocating while in my exam room for, after all, there is a small but non-zero probability that all of the molecules of air in the part of the room where they are seated will head to the opposite side of the room leaving them in a vacuum. The response I get to this statement has convinced me that an appreciation of real world event probabilities in the general population is very rare indeed.
When I first heard about the European ash-cloud grounding air traffic I naively assumed that there would be an immediate program of test flights with dust collectors flying transits through the cloud. Given the demonstrated effects of high concentrations of atmospheric volcanic ash on jet engines, I assumed that there would be scores of military propeller powered aircraft mapping the ash concentrations at various altitudes and studying the progression and dispersion of the ash. Nothing has surprised me more when I found out there were no test flights but that instead a computer model was being used to predict the progress of the ash cloud and to determine when it would be safe to fly. The only way I can characterize such an approach is complete imbecility and one should find out what institutions of “higher’ learning the individuals making these decisions attended so one knows what universities to steer students away from.
Every jet aircraft that flies through a rainstorm is exposed to non-zero concentrations of dust as dust particles serve as condensation nuclei for raindrops. We know well the hazards that aircraft experience in such conditions and glass coatings on turbine blades aren’t anywhere near the top of the list. Those who suggested safe exposure limits to various dust concentrations are absolutely correct and the ignorance of this fact by those making decisions about whether aircraft fly or not is frightening. When stupidity on such a massive scale is manifested it is no wonder that the spectre of totalitarian control of air travel is brought up so often.
What worries me as a physician is that the government (Canada has socialized medicine) will chose to cut costs by replacing lab tests with computer models. After all, the price of computer time is steadily dropping whereas the cost of doing laboratory tests continues to climb. Rather than order a CT scan on a patient, I’m sure that bureaucrats would prefer that all of the clinical data was entered into a human physiologic simulation and I could tell a patient: “Mrs Jones, the computer says you don’t have lung cancer and predicts you will die from a myocardial infarct so here is the exercise program and diet the computer program has computed for you.” The computer modeling approach would also forbid the performance of autopsies as there seems to be no need for actual measured data to refine the predictions of these highly sophisticated and infallible computer models.
God,yes,please.Ground ALL aircraft from Euroweenie land so they can’t infect NA. And the “Royal” society is worried.Well’royal inbreeding will do that to ya.
“Post-Normal Science” is what Obama is using to get to Mars (ha ha to that). Apply to electricity, but first stock a warehouse of candles. NO THANKS. “Nature is not fooled” — Richard Feynman.