As a follow up to our 4/19 story about ash cloud modeling:
Ash cloud models – overrated? A word on Post Normal Science by Dr. Jerome Ravetz
I offer below a compendium of articles from Benny’ Pieser’s CCNET and GWPF of the UK
Above:
The Met Office has been blamed for triggering the “unnecessary” six-day closure of British airspace which has cost airlines, passengers and the economy more than £1.5 billion.–The Telegraph 19 April, 2010
…
Global airlines have lost about $1.7bn of revenue as a result of the disruptions caused by the Icelandic volcanic eruption, a body has said. Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of IATA, criticised governments for the haste with which they closed airspace, and called on them to provide compensation to the airlines. “Airspace was being closed based on theoretical models, not on facts. Test flights by our members showed that the models were wrong.” —BBC, 21 April 2010
…
We are becoming a risk-averse society and that is dangerous. You cannot run a national economy on the precautionary principle; indeed, the sound position is to embrace as much risk as possible. Societies that embrace risk, such as the United States and recently the UK, tend to thrive, while those that seek to minimise risk, such as Britain during the 1970s, tend to wither. Financial capital is now fleeing Britain, heading to the Far East. A long queue of companies is chasing the money, including our own Prudential, which is floating a business on the Chinese stock market. The true venturers are over there, not in Britain. —The Times, 21 April 2010
…
Rational decisions have to be taken on the basis of some empirical understanding of the risks involved, and on the balance between risk and reward (or the cost of avoiding risk). Exposing the nonsense and muddle of the so-called precautionary principle is an essential part of the GWPF’s declared mission ‘to bring reason, integrity and balance to a climate debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant’. If the argument now raging over the policy response to the volcanic ash clouds assists in achieving this, it will demonstrate that ash clouds, too, have a silver lining. —The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 20 April 2010
The Oxburgh Committee should be able to produce a credible five page report on the flight ban controversy. Plus, they can get it done in almost no time, and without interviewing any of the contending parties.
Richard North (13:41:42) :
Thanks, case closed!
Bob (Sceptical Redcoat) (13:09:51) :
stevengoddard (10:11:42) :
If a plane had of gone down, everyone would be screaming for their heads. The Met Office is in a no-win situation, and chose “better safe than sorry.”
Steven: In that case, because the situation has not changed, the aircraft should all remain grounded.
Aye, Bob
But the situation has changed on an hourly basis, both with regard to the emission from the volcano and its distribution by the winds. Current emissions have substantially decreased since a couple of days ago:
http://www.esa.int/images/Volcano_Iceland_19-04-2010_H.jpg
and today:
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/crefl1_143A2010111123500-2010111124.jpg
enneagram (13:10:37) :
I wonder if a photo from space would have made it better. When in 2008 the Chaiten volcano erupted we all saw a lot of pictures taken from space of its ashes crossing the SA continent. What happened this time, was it there a particular interest in stopping all flights in the minds of some EU bureaucrats?
As we did this time, see above, that’s part of the information that the London VAAC used in developing their advisories.
Henry chance (10:47:25) :
Planes cost a lot of money even when sitting about. At an airport they cost fees, and they are essentially also not paying off the loan raised to buy them, as would pretty much always be the case except for rich privately owned airlines.
I was wondering about the insurance side too. That will not prevent the money being paid somehow, though, it just spreads the load from the passengers who have to pay 10% extra for flights in the future to everyone having to pay 1% more on their insurance policies (%ages plucked out of thin CO2, BTW).
REPLY: Thanks for proving my point Phil, pilots/dispatch can make the decision, as they should. As you demonstrated with personal experience, they can avoid it.
Based on the model data just as in this case, if the plume in that case had been over Anchorage airport it would have been shut down.
If you can avoid something there is no reason to shut down everything based on model output alone. Don’t fly where the ash is is no more difficult than don’t fly into a hurricane or batch of thunderstorms.
In the absence of the model data that isn’t possible, you can see a hurricane or a thunderstorm.
Even in severe storm situations, entire swaths of airspace are not closed, they leave it up to the pilots for risk assessment/avoidance. There’s no reason to take a blanket approach if you can track it by observation. Observation trumps modeling. I’ll trust a pilots judgment of a situation over the Met office model and/or a bureaucrat every time. – Anthony
I’d suggest that the families of the occupants of Continental Flight 3407, for example, would disagree with you and wish that the FAA would bite the bullet and institute the recommendations of the NTSB regarding flight into known icing. It’s being held up “pending economic analysis”!
Henry chance (10:47:25) :
Stop. The 1.7 billion pound loss is a loss to the top line… (etc)
No, you Stop. You don’t understand Airline business models.
Anytime a plane is sitting on the ground, it is not earning revenue and therefore is costing the company money, both in airport fees, depreciation and interest costs. Even if it is fully owned (not leased or on borrowed money) then it still represents a multi-million dollar asset not being used. Like a hotel sitting empty for a week. The airlines cannot get back the lost capacity – you try earning your full salary on two days a week. Now they have the fly all the existing ticket holders (that still want to go) and turn away new customers that can’t get onto a full plane. They will have to refund some cancelled tickets, and in some cases will have to pay other airlines to take their excess capacity. This will play out for some weeks until the backlogs are cleared. There will then be a follow-on period where people are wary about flying and will choose to stay at home, use video conferencing, or any other number of substitutes for flying.
No insurance company is going to pick up the tab for this : it’s excluded under ‘act of god’. Not the airlines, the travellers, probably not even the people in Iceland whose cars have been wrecked by ingesting ash. Even if by some miracle an underwriter got it wrong and included volcanic ash contamination, the airlines will still pick up the bill for the insurance through increased premiums for the next x years, plus you’ll find volcanic ash events excluded from future policies explicitly.
The Met Office Forecast accuracy interval has been increasing at about 0.5 days per decade.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/verification/forecast.html
HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp*
ah lubs me some hockey stick
I was alarmed to see vision of a 747 taking off from Heathrow with vortices of dust swirling back from their engines. This was dust apparently on the runway that had settled.
I guess the big question is, how much of this dust remains in the air ? Is it layered by particle size according to altitude?
One way to do a rough check is to install a clean air filter on your car and drive for a day, tape off a small area for comparison.
Has anyone calculated how much CO2 was not emitted as a result of the planes being grounded? It was a dry run for the cap-n-trade, no?
According to http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=17964&channel=6&title=More+than+1.5M+tonnes+of+carbon+saved+by+airline+grounding+
1.5 million tons with the volcano emitting 40k tons in the same period (one week).
But more ferries, trains and cars were running that sort of made up for it.
A comment was made today that Qantas was losing $2m per day and it only takes 8 days like this to equal ex CEO Geoff Dixon’s payout. Puts a new perspective on things, plus the savings on Avgas.
Instead of Qantas supporting their passengers, they stuffed up the PR exercise by complaining about the cost.
@Henry chance (10:20:50) : “A £30 million supercomputer, designed to predict climate change, has been named as one of Britain’s worst polluters in the latest embarrassment for the Met Office.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6098859/The-Met-Office-super-computer-by-numbers.html”
This is a false comparison. One should not compare the MET’s building with other office buildings, but with production facilities like factories. The MET’s computers produce a product – information. (Whether people agree with the results or how they are applied is another matter.)
Bulldust (17:43:14) :
“Has anyone calculated how much CO2 was not emitted as a result of the planes being grounded? It was a dry run for the cap-n-trade, no?”
The currently promoted greenhouse theory is dead and its consequences have to be removed at once.
“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact”
Charles Darwin
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5583
People haven’t realised yet. The media is silent but people will have died because of the no fly rules. Most organs for organ donations go by air. Ground transport is too slow. A percentage of people on waiting lists for organ transplants die while they wait. There will have been several dozen death in Europe as a result. If the met office gets sued fro damages you will see subsiquent legal actionson these deaths. It will take a few weeks, end of the month for anyone to notice but someone will notice a bump in statisics in mortality of people on organ waiting lists.
The no fly will have also fouled up hundreds of chemotherapy treatments and radiation therapy treatments. These drugs and isotopes are time sensitive and generally go by air. No one is talking about this aspect.
“But scientists at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology said an initial analysis of samples collected over Zurich last weekend by special weather balloons concluded that safety concerns were warranted and the volcano could be getting more dangerous.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_iceland_volcano;_ylt=Ao2yaWBf0FQrOItYgbiZpA4b.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTM3aDNoYWpiBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNDIyL2V1X2ljZWxhbmRfdm9sY2FubwRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzIEcG9zAzIEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawNyZWNyaW1pbmF0aW8-
Have any of the propeller heads at the Met Office heard of “Hamatan”?
I suggest someone look into it because sand filled skies are a common state of affairs in West Africa around Xmas….yep, yes sirree …this happens EVERY year! No point in washing your car during Hamatan as it is yellow from dusty sand the next day.
Do these Met Office boffins live in caves?
I am appalled.
We were flying regularly during Hamatan in West Africa even though visibility was terrible some days.
@ur momisugly wesley bruce (19:09:01) : “People haven’t realised yet. The media is silent but people will have died because of the no fly rules. Most organs for organ donations go by air. ”
This is a good point. But, I don’t think it is enough to justify resuming commercial flights in dangerous conditions (if they exist). I do wonder if government have plans for providing emergency transportation of donated organs or other medically vital supplies during such emergencies.
Hey, someone’s trying to use instruments to measure ash! Are they allowed to do that?
LIDAR being used to detect volcanic ash and an international network might be able to monitor the ash.
Err, guys. You’ve fallen for the oldest MSM trick in the book. It is not a 1.7b loss. How can it be when they were previously reporting a 128m loss/day. The newspaper says “Global airlines have lost about $1.7bn of revenue”. Revenue is ticket sales. That does not account for fuel, maintenance and other direct costs associated with flying a plane. For example, Ryanair doesn’t even pay its First Officers a penny if they don’t fly. Using knowledge of my airline’s costs I would guestimate that the actual loss was about 400m.
As for the story about all the decision based on the computer model, we’ve been duped. It is rubbish. The Met Office created a forecast using a computer model, like they do for all forecasts including aviation sigwx, etc. This was combined with sample flights, observations on the ground and satellite imagery.
The fact is the met office was correct, there was an ash cloud over Europe so what is the problem? The Met Office has become a political tool to extract money and compensation from the governments by the airlines and a means to make a story by the MSM.
We’re all sceptics of MSM here. Don’t be a sucked in just because they are slating the Met Office. Look past the news, research and look at the facts. As is so often the case, the public story is quite different from reality.
As for damage due to ash, this report by Volvo sums up the problem very well.
http://www.volvoaero.com/volvoaero/global/en-gb/newsmedia/press_releases/actual/Pages/Default.aspx
Very abrasive,clogging and,due to sulphuric acid,corrosive.
From the headline:
“Airlines Blame Flawed Computer Modeling For Up To $1.7 Billion Loss”
===============
BTW : Taxpayers to pay the bill.
Who the [snip]
else would pay!!
Who the [snip] else, could afford it.
Jeremy (19:31:05) :
Have any of the propeller heads at the Met Office heard of “Hamatan”?
I asked the same question a few threads back Jeremy. Having spent 12 years flying back and forth to Nigerian Oilfield from the UK. From November to February, many daily flights made were through the Sahara sand storms blowing down the West of Africa. We would then use helicopters to take us out to the rigs and it was only low visibility (.5km) that forced flights to divert or be cancelled.
I have not idea as to the abrasive difference but it would now seem that the engine manufacturers have now issued data as to the amount the engines can ingest per second without harm/damage.
Me? Just glad I do not have a flight till the 5th May to a place out of the cloud and away from the poor sods trying to get home!
And all because the European Commission and British government is full of nannies who want to tell you what to do, how to think, and how to live.
Risk aversion and precautionary principles basically boil down to giving them control of your lives and paying huge taxes for their spending pleasure.
@Pete H
“Have any of the propeller heads at the Met Office heard of “Hamatan”?”
And Ghibilli and Scirroco! Somewhat outside of knowledge area, but I would suggest that the helicopters were equipped for their mission with appropriate training, procedures and maintenance. You typical European airline would ever plan would plan operations in a sandstorm!
Another important consideration is that ash clouds also tend have a derth of oxygen which is what contributes to the flameout scenarios.
@Al gore…
“Risk aversion and precautionary principles basically boil down to giving them control of your lives and paying huge taxes for their spending pleasure.”
What do you mean by risk aversion? There is always risk, but the question is can it be managed or mitigated? If not then the risk is unquantifiable and thus unacceptable. There is no mitigation strategy with volcanic ash, other than to avoid it completely.
Yesterday during an interview on the BBC News, the head of the authority that banned flights in the UK stated that they had a “change of heart” during negotiations with British Airways. Hitherto they were adamant that the ban should continue on the basis of computer modelling.
Thia ia an admission that computer modelling is irrelevant to real world. In otehr words, a “change of heart” is all that is needed to stop airplanes from being affected by volcanic ash. If a “change of heart” hadn’t occurred then airplanes wouldn’t be safe.
I find it utterly amazing that emotions determine how safe aircraft are during volcanic eruptions.
One isn’t just sceptical of the media. One is also convinced that scientific procedure has become so corrupt that neither climate scientists nor modellers of the atmosphere ahve any grap of what is possible and what isn’t possible, and this ignorance isn’t confined only to governmetn backed climate propagandists.
From the headline:
“Airlines Blame Flawed Computer Modeling For Up To $1.7 Billion Loss”
====================
So, airlines want 1.7 billion, of taxpayer dollars due to a forecast produced by government forecasters.
I’m sure the taxpayers, might agree with your 1.7 billion dollar request.
Only in your dreams, could airlines make 1.7 billion dollars in a week.
Sorry: but I’m a skeptic, voter and taxpayer.