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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Madman (08:33:32) :
The argument is not whether this was dangerous or not, but rather that the airlines and the passengers should make the risk assessment. The problem with the government making the assessment is that they are very risk-intolerant and will almost always make a decision that is too conservative.
Absolutely agree, and as others have said, this isn’t the Met offices fault. I would assume (hope!) they are doing the best with the data at hand.
The British Met Office has always come under fire for failure to predict.
Ignoring the risks one way or another, I think this does highlight the underlying fault of weather/climate prediction: it’s more often wrong than right [for a given individual or subset of individuals], yet people put immense faith in said predictions.
Ironically, this is a predictor of the AGW situation: those doing the predicting will not be the ones to bear the cost of actions [to be] taken to mitigate the risks. Likewise, they will not be the ones to set or enforce any rules to ensure the burden is taken up by those who are party to neither the predictions or enforcement.
To that end, when the predictors hit the limelight, even though they may not be the enforcers, it’s unsurprising those bearing the burden come after the predictors.
Government employees are usually conservative in their decisions, due to fear of losing their jobs. They go wherever the “tide” goes, NEVER against the wind.
stevengoddard (09:03:19) :
I’ve been on trans-Atlantic flights where another jumbo jet crossed paths within half a mile. No doubt a screw up, and the idea of quickly rerouting hundreds of jets around an unpredictable ash plume seems unmanageable.
It only seems unmanageable to you, because you have no clue about what is involved. You seem to be like Khan. You are intelligent, but not experienced. Your pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_%28air_traffic_control%29#Vertical_separation
StevenGoddard:
“One plane going down in the ash would have been a much bigger loss to the airlines than one week of forced closure of the British airspace.”
That might be true – but it is the Airlines’ decision whether or not to take that risk, not the Met office.
The world runs off computer models these days.
Weather models from NCAR and The Met Office are very accurate. You can even run NCAR’s weather models on your Windows PC.
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/downloads.html
Rob Honeycutt (10:02:35) :
It is one thing to have one distressed plane, and quite a different management problem to have dozens or hundreds of them at the same time.
Steven Goddard
I suspect if all airport security was stopped,there would be a lot of planes crashing or exploding.Interesting article in the WSJ about Alaska airlines.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704133804575198183757930998.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read
There are 3 incidents of airplanes flying through ash,but all engines did recover,so perhaps the risk is over stated.
In 1982, a British Airways 747 near Jakarta, Indonesia, flew through an ash cloud at 37,000 feet from the Mount Galunggung volcano. All four of its engines choked on ash and flamed out. The 747 glided for 13 terrifying minutes. Ash filled the cabin through air vents and the cockpit window was severely scratched.
End
I say Let people choose,if they are warned of the risk,and decide to accept that risk,the airlines should not be able to be sued if a plane did go down.
I wonder if the people travelling on Alaskan airlines have any idea that there is a risk,when their planes are travelling after an eruption?
Dear Steven
I think you are being too magnaminous to the Met Office and Nats. The line you have drawn could easily be adjusted soutward to miss Ireland and come in from the west without any change in distance. The analogy is with a segment of an orange.
My reading is that the quantity of material was not measured and there were two different maps showing where the cloud was positioned.
Henry chance (08:39:37) :
This is exactly why we see the faults in The Met Office models.
The met uses models and can’t gather actual data from observation. Yes the plane flies at an altitude higher than the “plume”. The plane also flies faster than the dispersion of the plume. If a plane flies west to california, it’s actual ground speed is still greater than the jet stream it flies into. If the cloud travels at 80 miles an hour and the plane flies at over 400, it can out run the ash cloud safely.
So if a plane takes off from Seattle, we calculate it’s speed and we can get wind direction and speed at varius altitudes applied to the volcanoe, we may still beat it to Heathrow when the eruption is at the same time.
And where do you think those winds aloft forecasts come from? The same computer that’s used to predict the dispersion of the plume (which contrary to your erroneous assertion it does very well). The Met can and does collect data from observation and uses it to update the forecasts as do the other 8 VAACs in the world. After Mt St Helens, Redoubt, Jakarta etc. in the 80s IATA put together the system of VAACs to cover the world instigated programs to develop models to provide reliable forecasts. A program which has been very successful in providing accurate predictions and has been credited with reducing the number of volcano related incidents.
Steve and I frequently disagree but on this subject we are in agreement. It is really annoying to see guys like Alan the Brit make completely nonsense remarks on here. “As I have said before, this thing can do 2 billion? calculations a second, but if what is being put into the blunt end & coming out at the sharp end is wrong, it doesn’t matter how fast your “puter” actually is, one just gets the wrong answer that much faster, but one doesn’t know it’s wrong. The point that is missed that the right answer comes out of the ‘sharp end’ as indicated by testing carried out in multiple events. The Met (actually the London VAAC) did what it was supposed to do it gave a very good advisory to the aviation authorities who made the decision based on established protocols. This is the same procedure that all the VAACs follow all over the world. They should be thanked for their work not pilloried because of political and financial concerns.
Also there’s a lot of nonsense about other aviation matters, ‘the plane can outfly the plume’ for example, not if the plane is flying in the opposite direction! On entering an ash plume your procedure is to execute a descending 180º turn at idle, you do not climb out of it, and set up best glide, ~240 knots at a glide ratio of ~15 so you’re dropping at about 1600 feet/minute. Above about FL 200 you’re outside the relight envelope so if any engines flame-out you can’t restart them for some time. In the case of the BA747 they were less than a minute away from doing a 180º and ditching in the ocean at night. In the case of the Redoubt 747 they were a minute away from impact too.
Regarding fuel resources, planes do carry a required reserve sufficient to divert to an alternate with a time reserve, suppose you’re en route to London and UK airspace is shut down so you divert to Paris or Frankfurt along with a load of others and get stacked up waiting for a runway, everybody running low on fuel. As I recall when US airspace was shut down on 911 39 planes diverted to Gander a largely unused airport, imagine that happening in Europe in already busy airspace. (those are the two busiest airports in Europe, LHR ~500,000 traffic movement/yr))
Many keep saying/thinking the Met Office closed the airspace. It did no such thing – it provided advice on the presence/absence of ash. Eurocontrol and the transport ministries made the closure decisions based on that *advice*.
Those agencies should have been aware of the limitations of what the Met Office can provide given the limited tools and observations MO has. Will these agencies, or the airlines, now fund a program to provide enough observations to verify/disprove the ash dispersion models for the next event?
Right now using a jet-engine teardown to verify ash concentration is like using tree rings to determine annual temperature. We need more and better thermometers, not proxies.
Steven Goddard:
“The odds of getting killed by a terrorist blowing up your airplane are very small, so perhaps we should get rid of all airport security too?”
I agree, it would be a good idea to get rid of airport security. Even better, let us exercise our 2nd ammendment and we can protect ourselves!
Besides, if there is such a massive terror threat – why arn’t the terrorists just blowing up department stores? There is no security there and more people. Perhaps the terror threat is an illusion used as an excuse to increase restrictions on travel. Think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of a terrorist. You want to blow something up. Why? Er, because that’s just what you do! Run with it! The airports have all this security now. Why would you not attack department stores instead? Why risk getting caught at the airport with all that security? Surely they would have switched to department stores by now? And don’t mention the tube and bus bombings because that was not “AL-CIA-DA” related. Why are Al-CIA-DA only focused on airports, where most of the security is run by Israeli companies (aka Mossad fronts)?
Some people say it is because airplanes are “higher value” targets. WTF? Are they joking? If Al-CIA-DA blew up a few department stores then the major western shopping centres would grind to a halt. In a consumer society, that is about as high impact as it gets. Imagine body scanners in every store, the restriction on movement would make people only go out for essential items.
There may be a reason why this is not happening though. Perhaps there actually are no bogey men! There are so many issues with the official story of 911 (see e.g. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth) that it is difficult to beleive in the bogey men anymore.
I don’t beleive in bogey men. I would rather have no security at airports, the same as we don’t have it in department stores, because I think that if these bogey men wanted to blow me up they would just as soon do it in a department store as in an airplane. Besides, even if there was a real terror threat to airplanes (but stragely not to department stores!), what are the odds of it being my plane? They are too low for the amount of hassle we have to go through every time we get on a plane, that’s for sure.
Rob Honeycutt (10:02:35) :
Volcanic ash WILL shut jet engines down. There are numerous incidents of this. Check the NTSB incident reports. Prudence is the better part of valor. This is especially true in aviation.
I don’t mean to be snarky here but I think a correction is in order: Volcanic ash in high enough concentration will shut engines down.
Everything seems to indicate that the concentrations of ash need to be substantial to shut an engine down and even then the reported failures do not appear to have been catastrophic.
I’m not saying we should blindly ignore risk, or that the initial shutdown was incorrect, but the invocation of a “zero tolerance” policy based on computer projections and not real-world verification was a ridiculous overreaction.
The proper management of this issue, past an initial grounding period, should have been to find the plume, altitudes, and concentrations… and to selectively restore routes when it could be verified that they were not at risk.
Prudence is necessary, no disagreement, but the term prudence implies that a certain level of reason is involved in the equation.
stevengoddard (09:32:20) :
“I flew every few weeks to Europe after 9/11, and the planes were nearly deserted for almost a year. People were scared to fly.”
You might be interested that a team of researchers from Cornell University estimated there were at least 1,200 more deaths on America’s roads than there would have been, as a result of people being afraid to fly after 9/11. Shutting down a very safe form of travel as result of a tiny perceived risk, as NATS and the CAA did this last week, can only increase the carnage on the roads.
stevengoddard (10:05:38):
Eduardo Ferreyra (09:54:00) :
I used to fly from SFO to London on a regular basis. The eastbound flights go over southern Greenland and pass just south of Iceland. Sometimes the westbound flights travel right over Iceland.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Steven, were your flight non stop, or had a stop over in the East Coast? Because transpolar flight are quite common.
stevengoddard (09:03:19) :
You reveal that you do not know much about commercial airline operations despite your apparent heavy use of them. Your example of a aircraft crossing in opposite directions is not a ‘screw-up’ – the aircraft are separated by 1000ft in altitude or 5 nautical miles if at the same altitude. I can assure you that 1000ft vertical separation looks precious little from the cockpit but all the aircraft are certified to maintain their authorised altitude very accurately (Required Minimum Navigation Performance – RMNP).
You also chose a bad example for your post. After take-off from Seattle a 747 would be unlikely to be able to reach an altitude in the stratosphere (ie above 36,000ft). For fuel efficiency reasons, however, it will step climb to higher altitudes as the flight progresses and may reach 39,000ft before approaching Iceland. Since Ejyafjallajokull has not been shooting ash clouds into the stratosphere (11km altitude – about 36,000ft) there is no mechanism by which significant ash could get that high so it would be OK to fly your plotted route.
http://www.evropusamvinna.is/page/ies_Eyjafjallajokull_eruption
Much bigger eruptions have occurred in the recent past. Pinatubo in 1991 spread ash around the globe between 20N and 10S well up into the stratosphere but flights were not prevented from crossing the equator. Between 1973 and 2003 there were 102 incidents between volcanic ash and aircraft. No-one was injured. No plane ‘went down’. In fact, based on past experience, a descent to lower altitude has allowed damaged engines to be re-started.
http://www.ofcm.gov/ICVAAS/presentations/s1–06guffanti.ppt
If you feel nervous about flying with a bit of dust in the air perhaps you should remember that humans fly and maintain your aircraft and they are statistically much more dangerous than volcanic ash.
Where’s the polar ice cap ?
Does this means that every flight that would normally fly above inactive and near active volcanoes should be changed outside a certain “safety” zone around them, you know… just to be safe? I don’t know how planes could fly in certain parts of the world if they aver do that. They often divert flights around big thunderstorms… just in case!
The society has become so disconnected from reality and so afraid of the reality of death that it is starting to cost to the economy. It might not be surprising that we are willing to spend septillions (10^24) of dollars to fix a non-problem (i.e. global warming).
In the present, the precautionary principal would recommend flight diversions, not cancellation.
Hu McCulloch (08:54:20) :
If drone spy/attack planes work in Afghanistan, it should be possible to build a drone jet to fly through the cloud and see if there are any problems. Just 1 or 2 of these could stand by to cover any spot in the world.
Yeah with a ceiling of 25,000 ft and a range of 400 miles that’ll work well. Iceland’s about 1000 miles from London, cover a swath 200 miles wide at all altitudes!
Billy Liar (10:38:34) :
(Required Minimum Navigation Performance – RMNP)
should read:
(Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum -RVSM)
Eduardo Ferreyra (10:38:06) :
stevengoddard (10:05:38):
Eduardo Ferreyra (09:54:00) :
I used to fly from SFO to London on a regular basis. The eastbound flights go over southern Greenland and pass just south of Iceland. Sometimes the westbound flights travel right over Iceland.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Steven, were your flight non stop, or had a stop over in the East Coast? Because transpolar flight are quite common.
Here’s the great circle route london to seattle.
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=lhr-sea
Similarly for the route to SFO both would have you flying along the axis of the plume!
Well, I’ll disagree. This shows the fallacy of relying on MET computer models and of letting the EU government dictate behaviour from on high. The post is based on several assumptions that don’t stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, it seems to ignore the existence of radio.
There is an element of truth, however, in that the MET has been unfairly accused of ordering the flight ban, and the post addresses that issue fairly. Overall, a good post, well “worth blogging about.”
Phil. (10:49:23) :
Hu McCulloch is right – you’re not.
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/Glopac/
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/research/GloPac/glopac_instruments.html
The Global Hawk can fly at altitudes up to 65,000 feet. Its range is greater than 10,000 nautical miles and its endurance is greater than 31 hours.
And it’s equipped for the job!
The Met Office reported actual ash data and provided predictions on how the ash cloud would change. Observations showed their model predictions were quite accurate.
What the aviation authorities choose to do with that data, and predictions, is up to them.
The MetO came out of this rather well. Shame the same can’t be said of the airline industry who created the problem by failing to conduct tests to determine safe operating limits.
Boo!
Did you you jump at all scare- easy-crowd?
Why would the flight path be assumed to be a straight line to begin with? And is flying close to Iceland, when a volcano is actively spewing out ash, a requirement?
The transatlantic airliners could’ve gone by route of New York, Washington DC, Miami, to Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France.
From Seattle one could open up a corridor by way over Siberia to Europe as well.
Did they shut down the whole west indies, and all countries around, a few weeks back?
Met Office ought to be sued back down to earth.