By Steven Goddard
As reported on WUWT, The UK Met Office is taking a lot of heat for airline financial loses, caused by no flight rules during the Icelandic volcanic eruption. Many readers have expressed their agreement with those criticisms.
I don’t agree with all of these criticisms, and here is why.
Suppose you are taking a ten hour 8:30 PM flight from Seattle to London. You pass Iceland eight hours into the flight, and ash conditions may have changed dramatically since you left. A new volcanic eruption may have occurred overnight, and your plane is almost out of fuel. No matter how accurate the circulation models are, they can not predict the behaviour of the volcano. The modelers and the people in charge of decision making have to be conservative.
Do you want to be on a plane over the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, which can’t progress forward and does not have enough fuel to turn back? I know I don’t. Erupting volcanoes can change in the blink of an eye, as people near Seattle found out at 8:32 AM on May 18, 1980. There is always going to be some risk, but this particular volcano has been spewing out a lot of ash and deserves particular caution.
Now that enough information has been gathered, the decision has been made to restore the flight schedules. It has been a very long week for travelers, but in terms of the required science and engineering – seven days isn’t very long when making life or death decisions.
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Hey Skipper,
Volcanoes in Central America and Indonesia don’t cause a lot of disruption because there aren’t a lot of planes landing nearby. When an explosive volcano goes off in Europe, it is a completely different story.
If Long Valley blows, it will spread deposits of ash across most of the US.
The possibility of having to divert dozens or hundreds of long haul flights exists every single day!
Did these airports need to be shut down?
stevengoddard:
There are two problems here.
First: The blanket closure of essentially all airports in Europe north of the Alps and east of the Pyrenees meant nothing was going anywhere, period. The decision to do so, based upon both world class bureaucratic timidity, aided by an ash fall model that was comprehensively wrong, applied just as much to even one airplane as all of them.
This had nothing to do with operational decisions of any sort: even airplanes that had enough fuel to turn around and go home weren’t allowed to fly.
Second: This volcano did not go off in Europe. It went off in Iceland, which is (referring to my North Atlantic plotting chart), roughly 500 miles from Inverness, Scotland, and nearly 900 miles from London.
Flights from Detroit and east would remain at least 400 miles from the volcano on their normal routes.
Mt St Helens was at least three times as big an eruption as E+15. Had sane people, using normal risk management simply decided to draw a six hundred mile circle around the volcano, which, so far as I have been able to determine, encompassed even trace amounts from MSH, then this would have been a non-event.
Did any measurable amount of ash fall on the ground even as far as 600 miles away?
Never mind 1000+.
More gross misrepresentations from you. The volcanic eruptions in the Asia-Pacific region were astride some of the busiest trans-oceanic air routes in the world. The only factor which made the recent Icelandic volcanic erupton “a completely different story” is the utterly irresponsible response of unnecessarily shutting down European airspace.
stephengoddard,
Your link to a fallacious video about the BA chief is trash!
Do you have anything rational to say on the subject?
Ian W
thanks.
I see two different diversion scenarios with two different fuel reserve requirements.
One is where there is little risk of something like a volcano interfering with air travel. A flight might then have a PNR but ample reserves, as I believe used to be done for Hawaii where bad weather would soon move on.
But in the case of known risk, such as an imminent eruption or an active eruption but the usual variability of winds (as apparently the case this year from Iceland), shouldn’t a flight plan include reserves to divert well out of the area?
A parallel might be how flight planning was done into the High Arctic and to oil platforms off the east coast of Canada, last I was close to those operations. In winter flights had to carry fuel to reach the destination and an alternate in the general area, make an instrument approach at each, then move on to a known dependable landing point if unable to land up/out there. Typically in those cases that meant return to point of departure, though there was the economic consideration for customers that they didn’t want to be in a third place they had no connection to. A lot of fuel, which cut into payload, but that was necessary because the weather was not dependable.
ASH CONCENTRATION THRESHOLD
– In the 1.7 Billion thread Richard North discusses ash measurement, as does the http://www.http://www.guardian.co.uk/ article “Iceland volcano ash cloud: The full story of how the airlines won the battle for the skies” including , and the ICAO document detailed in a later post herein.
– Observe that when the UK CAA made its decision to relax, airliners were already flying over the UK – it sounds as though the conservatism was only in UK lower-level airspace. A Reuters report indicates continental operations may have restarted on April 21, whereas the Guardian article indicates UK airspace was opened late that evening.
– Does anyone have references to what the no-fly threshold originally was? The article linked above says “ten billionths of a billion of a gram…per cubic metre” which is not correctly stated (a superfluous “billion” word). If ten billionths that is several orders of magnitude lower than what was eventually accepted (2000 micrograms per cubic metre with precautions), even if one calculates on the smaller US billion (10E09 not 10E12 (have to check Canada, it tends to be bilingual :-). “Micro” is 1E-06? (Can anyone measure ten billionths of a gram per cubic metre, real time?)
– Another article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268615/The-ash-cloud-How-volcanic-plume-UK-twentieth-safe-flying-limit-blunders-led-lock-down.html# gives a value for real ash concentrations over the UK as one-twentieth of the relaxed limit of 2000 micrograms but is not specific as to area and date/time.
– The Daily Mail article claims that the ICAO guidance is zero tolerance, but that the US and other countries ignore that, however another part of its articles muddies that. It also claims that some weather services such as WSI used different criteria than the Met Office, quoting WSI as using a “visible ash” threshold (which Mt. St. Helens experience suggests to me is itself conservative).
– The article referring to redeployment of lasers doesn’t specify how the lasers were used – perhaps pointed up and detected by satellites, which gives visibility that might be correlated to density if the ash is uniform in light blocking effect (similar to RVR measurement for horizontal visibility at airports). Sounds coarse and approximate.
– The article also says the UK was in the unfortunate position of having its high-flying measurement aircraft down for maintenance so had only the DO228 which cannot fly high. (It’s data should be quite useful to correlate to laser measurements.) I ask why someone else couldn’t help out. (Airlines in continental Europe made less sophisticated measurements I suppose.)
– The stuff moves around (no kidding, Keith!), that’s why measurement and forecasting is essential. Initial forecasts in this case were of wind toward the UK, but those shifted to a more northeasterly direction. (In the eruption that the NASA DC-8 was affected by the winds were to the NNE.) In this case ash showed up off the east coast of Canada, though note it can circle the globe. Note that the main airport in Iceland was not as badly affected in this case as you might expect, perhaps because volcanoes often push ash very high (45000 feet from the Mt. Hekla eruption in Iceland in 2000) and it is then carried elsewhere by wind as it begins to fall. (See map and satellite image of the ash cloud the NASA DC8 encountere.)
GUIDANCE & OPERATIONAL ADVISORIES
– ICAO has a 2007 vintage document about volcanic ash and other air contaminants downloadable n/c at http://www.icao.int/icao/en/9691.pdf. It discusses the nature of volcanoes and their ash (which varies – data from Mt. St. Helens is included), measurement of ash concentration, effect on jet aircraft (which may vary with engine vintage, risks also include possible blockage of pitot tubes and contamination of electronics), a list of incidents with brief mention of severity, and even a very long list of eruptions that produced ash of concern to aviation. It provides guidance on handling an inadvertent encounter. There seems to be confusion in the media over the word “avoid”, but paragraph 3.4.8 does say AVOID AVOID AVOID because it claims there are no agreed values of acceptable concentration. (That seems to have left some people in the modern “zero is acceptable” unrealistic box.) That is unfortunate given Mt. St. Helens experience. Yet in section 5.1.3.1 it talks of continuing operations at an airport, especially to get people out (which I see as risky with much ash on the ground) but also landing – and provides guidance to minimize damage and risk. Obviously a lot of effort went into the document, and it is quite educational for operators, maintainers, airports, forecasters, and ATC, but it seems contradictory (as if a committee effort) and wimps out on practical guidance.
– The European authority EASA issued an advisory and bulletin with guidance for operating in air with a low concentration of ash. It includes routine inspections daily, and after each flight if certain phenomeon are observed.
– They advise that ICAO will work on standards for ash concentration – about time given the frequency of volcanic ash plumes. (The draft report of the WMO International Workshop in March 2010 says Airbus will contact engine manufacturers, and besides quite technical discussion talks about better information in various aspects as well as more coordination and use of existing resources. Boeing, GE, Rolls and Pratt & Whitney are not in the draft participants list but Pratt is shown as a panel member in one session as is Lufthansa. Qantas (who presented on costs of operating in a volcano environment) and the Airbus rep for LAN Chile airline arek listed as is a Chilean regulatory official.) A Boeing article says Alaska airlines is set up to get lots of information on ash in the air to make decisions and advise pilots (having of course experienced Mt. Redoubt and Mt. St. Helens erupting in their areas of operations). I read that USGS heads a volcano observatory for Alaska, which is on many long-range air routes, and that organization coordinates with Russian experts. It seems there is much information extant, though not as precise as is desired, but it must be disseminated and digested.
– Note that the NASA DC-8’s engine damage was from an Icelandic volcano. The technical report shows the airplane lifing off with substantial powder on the ground – I presume it was snow! – but the airplane definitely had an airborne encounter in darkness well north of Iceland enroute to its testing base in Sweden and lesser encounters during testing. The flight path was 800 nautical miles from the volcano, 200 nm beyond forecast area though the ash was moving NNE. (The ash was not as severe as the 747 inadvertent cases, with no static discharge indications for example, but was measured by onboard instruments. The report shows “aerosol number density, cm-3”, from a “condensation nuclei counter”.)
– This is of course serious work. The typical jet engine operates on a safe life concept, anything that severely reduces part life but is undetected could have serious consequences beyond simply loss of thrust from one engine. However it seems that many people thought only of complete avoidance – which is wise if the nature of the ash in the air is not known – overlooking that it will disperse widely but much of that coverage will be light concentration.
From EU Referendum
Speaking as a geologist, former pilot and meteorologist, he wrote, “I would say the Met Office is not to blame for the airspace debacle
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/04/useless-parasites.html
Still waiting for any of the Met Office haters to produce one shred of evidence that The Met Office did anything wrong.
Iceland[note 1] ( /ˈaɪslənd/ (help·info)) (Icelandic: Ísland (names of Iceland); IPA: [ˈislant]) is a European island country located in the North Atlantic Ocean[6]
In the ensuing centuries, Iceland became one of the poorest countries in Europe.
The economy was greatly diversified and liberalised when Iceland joined the European Economic Area in 1994.
Iceland is a part of Europe, not of North America,
Iceland is the world’s 18th largest island, and Europe’s second largest island
The volcanic eruption of Laki in 1783–1784 caused a famine that killed nearly a quarter of the island’s population;[33] the eruption caused dust clouds and haze to appear over most of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for several months afterward.[34]
Dettifoss, located in northeast Iceland. It is the largest waterfall in Europe
Iceland is a member of European Economic Area (EEA), which allows the country access to the single market of the European Union (EU)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland
One of the reasons I said there are so many misrepresentations is the ash concentrations. The Met Office characterized 10 to 130 micrograms per cubic meter as “high concentrations” and “very high concentrations” of volcanic ash in its reports. At these concentrations, it would require an aircraft hundreds of thousands of years in high speed flight and distances well beyond the orbit of Pluto into interstellar space to ingest just one gram of the volcanic ash. Non-aviators should note that aircraft engines and aircraft cannot be operated for hundreds of thousands of years or billions of kilometers without being maintained, retired from service, and scrapped.
stevengoddard:
You are being pedantic. By your line of reasoning, a volcano in Greenland, or the Falklands, also happened in Europe.
Iceland is located in the North Atlantic. It is cannot possibly be located in Europe because, Europe is the name for a continent, and, last I checked, the definition for the word continent does not include islands 600 miles away.
If a volcano pops off in Bavaria, it erupted in Europe. A volcano that erupts 1000 miles north east didn’t erupt in Europe, it erupted in Iceland.
Try this on as many people as you wish: Hand a globe to someone after saying a volcano erupted in Europe, and ask them to point out approximately where that volcano erupted.
Not even victims of American high school geography classes are going to point anywhere near Iceland.