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.
“Erupting volcanoes can change in the blink of an eye, as people near Seattle found out at 8:32 AM on May 18, 1980. ”
Non erupting volcanoes can do the very same thing. We should ground ALL flights. While it is nice and wonderful to say that safety is first, what was first is that they spent 5 or 6 days without sending any actual test equipment up to see what the reality was and based the entire grounding on computer models. You cannot possibly condone that sort of action can you? Grounding the planes for a day or two while they launched weather balloons and used storm chaser aircraft to actually see what was going on I could see as safety, after that it is negligence.
Steve,
are you a sceptic or a contrarian??
Symon (16:56:44) :
I’ve taken that drive many times. Even the cops are stoned. I once exited at Scotts Valley with an overheated radiator and three small kids in the back of the car.
A cop spotted me not wearing my seat belt and followed me into the gas station, where I explained the situation. After he wrote the ticket and was walking away, I got out of the car to go buy some coolant. He pulled his gun and demanded to know where I was going. I told him I was going to “buy some coolant.” He thought that over for a minute and then gave me the all clear.
kuhnkat (17:10:33) :
I am a scientist/engineer. I am interested in the truth.
The title of this article is “In Defense Of The Met Office.” I understand that some would like to blame all the evils of the world on Met Office models, but I haven’t seen anyone present any evidence that the Met Office did anything wrong.
Heathrow receives over 400 long haul flights per day. That means there are a lot of flights over the ocean in the air headed to London at any given time. And Heathrow is just one airport of many in Europe.
No doubt some small airstrip in Greenland can handle hundreds of diverted jumbo jets though.
I disagree.
Flights are rerouted all the time in the USA due to severe weather. Pilots, dispatchers, and the FAA work hand in hand to deal with the issues as they arise. Often storms bloom around Miami long after the flights have left Seattle. Planes will divert if they run low on fuel. It is called operations and the airlines are very good at it.
All flights are required to have PET or Point of Equal Time destinations all along their route. These are other locations they can divert to. Looking at the polar route you drew, the flight can divert around Iceland opposite the plume location to Scandinavia/Ireland, Russia, land in Iceland, or turn back and land in Canada. Or Greenland. Or, they can climb to a higher altitude or a lower one.
Flights are also required to maintain fuel reserves that are the worst-case scenario to finish the flight, ie flying at 10,000 feet with a headwind and having to circle in a pattern before landing.
Come one this is silly
Yesterday New Scientist was saying global warming is causing the ash fall.
What happened today? http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ruv.is%2F&sl=is&tl=en did global warming fail?
Volcanic Dust????
UK south west 3 weeks unwashed!
http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/3530/volcanicdust.jpg
Note the new layer on the window
Many cars exhibit this fine buff colored dust. In sunlight there are reflective bits visible.
Is it volcanic origin?
any way of telling?
If volcanic then the dust is not all above 16000ft. Planes fly through many layers on take off.
Engines suck a lot more air that a windscreen! turbine blades are cooled by through flow air. Turbine blades reach temperatures where glassification can occur.
cooling channels closed by glassified dust will lead to overheat and EVENTUAL failure (see the NASA experience)
There have been few eruptions in european crowded airspace. This may be the first example?
Planes cannot detect dust with radar (it is tuned for water molecules)
Planes cannot therefore steer around a cloud. They would have to use the info from the met models. These have been claimed to be inaccurate!
The met office predicts the path and height.
The met office does not say it is unsafe to fly.
The met office does not fly planes to test the dust cloud.
Who wants 400 deaths on their conscience
The Guardian has a detailed summary of the process behind the decision to reopen the air space:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/21/airlines-battle-skies
stevengoddard (17:49:48)
You write that the Met Office did no wrong. What did they do right?
They failed to communicate the urgent need for measurements to verify the models’ outputs by making the users of the information aware of the limitations of the models.
Diversions around clouds don’t mean necessarily taking a 180 degree turn. If they could not get to Heathrow, then there would have been a fair number of other options on the European continent even 6 hours after the eruption; unless the *authorities* shut down all the airports because they don’t fully understand what the VAAC London (Met Office) is telling them; nor understand and take responsibility for the consequences of needlessly shutting down airspace.
Airlines and aircraft manufacturers also contributed to the fiasco. They allowed the zero-tolerance myth to propagate into regulation. They’ve certainly had 20 years of flying jets through ash clouds from which to draw some idea of what constitutes acceptable and catastrophic exposure. They should have been requesting estimates and subsequent measurements to confirm ash concentration levels from VAACs based on exposure and risk criteria.
IIRC, manufacturers now specify 2000 ppm as (commercially?) acceptable, presumably indefinite exposure. Which is infinitely more than that which was ASSUMED acceptable by Eurocontrol. “No specified level” of exposure isn’t the same as zero.
Another SEA-LHR aviation route map, identical to the one in this article.
http://avise1.com/route-map/
Seems very simple for the Icelandic government (oops – maybe that’s a bad assumption….) to fly one weather balloon (with GPS, battery, radio location transponder, and height-ballast drop controller-ballast bag) from the volcano site each day, one balloon every six hours until the ash plume ceases.
Cost? Once the prototype is built: less than 2500.00 per balloon and transponder set.
Balloon (by definition) flies the same route at the same wind speed as the plume at that height, as long as the ballast controller and height (altimeter) device remain charged. You need one low altitude, 2 at assumed plume height, and 1 aobve the plume height.
Go high-tech – One every other day, add a filter and fan moter to see actually how much dust is present.
Now you know where the plume is. You avoid the plume.
End of “model” assumptions. End of hysteria by the Met Office (defeinding their models) and the bureaucratic control by the unknown bureaucrats in the EU anonymous halls of anonymous government control.
Well, now that you mention it, we can takeup the challenge and give it a good go around (smile).
A flight path is not a Great Circle, and a Great Circle is not a flight path. The Great Circle route is in the simplistic sense the shortest segment of a path between to points along a circle around the globe. Commercial jet flights follow jet routes as mapped on jet route navigation charts in conformance with ICAO guidelines, international agreements, and national authorities. Flight planning attempts to prepare a flight plan which takes the flight between waypoints along the jet routes which are advantageous with respect to weather, the effect of upper level winds upon fuel burn and flight times, air traffic on the jet routes, segemnts of multiple Great Circles, fuel temperatures, and an assortment of other considerations. Consequently, each flight on a given service route varies from previous flights. They virtually never actually fly on the Great Circle route, which is why the Web page you linked to says, “Great Circle Mapper. This information may not be accurate or current and is not valid for navigation or flight planning. No warranty of fitness for any purpose is made or implied.” Accordingly, your link is not actually fit for the purpose of illustrating the navigation of your actual flight path.
The GPS TV station you say gave your position fooled you. It is, in fact, the flight information channel of an IFE (In-Flight Entertainment) system. It too is not fit for the purpose of flight planning or flight navigation. They come in a number of varying capabilities and configurations, so the exact functions cannot be exactly described without knowing exactly which system was in use. However, the flight information channel of the IFE systems typically display what they describe as the “simulated” position of the aircraft. The simpler implementations of the flight information channel use the Great Circle route for the service route as proxy graphic for the total flight. The GPS unit used to orient the antenna for the IFE video entertainment also provides the information necessary to position the aircraft graphic along the proxy Great Circle route, service route, or map graphic. Despite the usage of GPS to orient the IFE antenna, the actual position of the aircraft is often kilometers, tens of kilometers, or hundeds of kilometers on either side of the “simulated” flight path and position presented on the SBE display as a relative indication of the progress of the flight along the idealized service route. It gives the passengers some “entertainment” to keep their minds busy.
There is a lot of skepticism about claims of near mid-air collisions on long-haul flights; because few passeners understand their sighting of another aircraft flying by at very close distances with closing speeds of around 1,200 miles per hour is done routinely in complete safety, deliberately, with no danger of collision, and no reason to be alarmed. It is not unusual to see a child’s face in the other aircraft’s passenger window where the Sun shines in as the other aircraft flashes by close enough to see faces. This surprises many people. What was it about the encounter which made you think it had to be an unauthorized near miss and near mid-air collision versus routine air traffic with legal separation of the aircraft?
You don’t understand, those are Great Circle “service” route maps. They do not represent actual flight paths used in flight planning and navigation. To get the concept across, think of the Great Circle route maps as analogous to the graphic used in a road atlas to represent the relative distances between cities without representing the actual highways and roads used to physically travel between the cities.
To see where an aircraft’s actual flight path is in relation to the Great Circle route, start with a jet navigation chart (JNC) and have a commerical flight crew draw their actual flight paths for you on the JNC.
RACookPE1978 (19:59:40) :
Your methodology might work for demonstrating that there is not a problem, but suppose it finds unacceptable levels of ash? It would provide no information about areal extent.
From Nasa document:
SUMMARY
In the early morning hours of February 28, 2000, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) DC-8 Airborne Sciences research airplane inadvertently flew through a diffuse plume of
volcanic ash from the Mt. Hekla volcano. There were no indications to the flight crew, but sensitive
onboard instruments detected the 35-hr-old ash plume. Upon landing there was no visible damage to the
airplane or engine first-stage fan blades; later borescope inspection of the engines revealed clogged
turbine cooling air passages. The engines were removed and overhauled at a cost of $3.2 million. Satellite
data analysis of the volcanic ash plume trajectory indicated the ash plume had been transported further
north than predicted by atmospheric effects. Analysis of the ash particles collected in cabin air heat
exchanger filters showed strong evidence of volcanic ash, most of which may have been ice-coated (and
therefore less damaging to the airplane) at the time of the encounter. Engine operating temperatures at the
time of the encounter were sufficiently high to cause melting and fusing of ash on and inside
high-pressure turbine blade cooling passages. There was no evidence of engine damage in the engine
trending results, but some of the turbine blades had been operating partially uncooled and may have had a
remaining lifetime of as little as 100 hr. There are currently no fully reliable methods available to flight
crews to detect the presence of a diffuse, yet potentially damaging volcanic ash cloud.
A seven minute flight through a dust cloud further north than UNEXPECTED = $3.2M
And what is worse not easily seen damage that reduced the engine life to 100hrs
Steven, I was almost with you until the
” stevengoddard (19:11:20) : The Guardian has a detailed summary of the process behind the decision to reopen the air space:”
Never never never use the Guardian word! Now go and wash your mouth out with soap and water 😉
Anyway, the planes are now back up in the air (and seem to be staying aloft), people are getting home or off on holiday/business, so let get back to the real job in hand!
D. Patterson (20:46:09) :
I have taken the SFO to LHR flight dozens of times and watched the GPS map repeatedly. The eastbound flight follows that route until it passes Iceland, then turns a little south in order to approach London from the west, passing over Ireland.
A really poor debating technique is to start a sentence out with “You don’t understand.” I understand just fine, thanks.
D. Patterson (20:34:19) :
One of my favorite things about the GPS systems on the planes, is that on the westbound flight I can watch the topography of Greenland out the window, and correlate it with the map on the TV. The correlation is excellent. There have even been a few times when the westbound flight went right over Iceland, which was a real treat.
The GPS systems on display are very accurate representations of the location of the plane. You can see rivers and towns as you cross them in real time.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jAf1iuo3kzP9oGbVLbZwP68iCFpwD9F89IUO0
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0418/Should-planes-fly-in-Iceland-volcano-ash-Be-careful-study-says.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0418/Should-planes-fly-in-Iceland-volcano-ash-Be-careful-study-says.
Matthias Ruete, the European Commission’s director general of transport has done so. The Met Office caused the closure of European airspace by using a computer model, NAMES III, to forecast the size, location and density of the volcanic plumes. Unfortunately, the Met Office failed to conduct more than four actual observations to provide real world data to confirm the accuracy or lack of accuracy of their computer model forecasts. The Met Office then compunded the alleged errors by continuing the computer model forecasts despite contradictory empirical evidence from satellite observations. Is it not wrong to use inaccurate fantasy models relied upon decisionmakers when empirical evidence conflicts with those unreal models?
Only a small number of commercial trans-Atlantic flights are beyond return to North American or European airports at any one time.
Keflavik IAP (IATA: KEF) has two runways with heavy jet capacities greater than 10,000ft. lengths. It has the capacity of landing all trans-Atlantic flights operating in its area. There are several other airfields also capable of landing trans-Atlantic flights in the event of an emergncy.
Greenland has a number of airports and airfields capable of taking non-emergency and emergency landings of trans-Atlantic flights.
There is no reason to fear a problem with availability of airfields on the trans-Atlantic routes or an excess in trans-Atlantic flights requiring emergency landings.
As a former NBC NCO, one of my responsibilities was to predict fallout patterns from nuclear yields and fallout has a lot of similarities to volcanic ash. These predictions can be fiendishly difficult as the particles fall through the atmosphere and encounter varying winds speeds and directions at different altitudes. Just yesterday I looked up into the sky and saw clouds at different altitudes moving at right angles to each other. Because of this the models are heavily safe-sided. If you are outside the predicted zones you’re almost certainly in a clean area, but if you’re inside the predicted zone it’s defiantly YMMV, your mileage may vary. The prediction is always intended as a starting point, to be replace by actual surveys of the existing situation. If it’s such a financial hardship for the airlines to be grounded for safe-sided ash predictions, they should get some aircraft modified to safely survey the ash clouds.
It isn’t a debating tactic. It is a simple statement of obvious fact. Otherwise, you would not conflate an illustration of a Great Circle route or Great Circle service route with an actual flight path. Just because the aircraft is in close proximity with its approach to a waypoint in the vicinity of Iceland does not mean the aircraft is always following the great circle segemnt of its flight plan elsewhere along the actual flight route. It’s like a clock with a rundown battery. It displays the correct time twice a day, despite the stationary hour and minute hands. Your “simulated” flight information channel is going to be exactly correct upon departure from Seattle, upon arrival at London, when flying over or by a waypoint, and along the Great Circle route whenever the jet route and flight conditions permit a close correspondence between the route and actual flight path. Nonetheless, they are not the same thing, and they are often, not always, far separated between intermediate points. Of course, you would know that if you filed a flight plan, read a JNC, and navigated an aircraft. You would also understand how a flight level of 4 to 7 nautical miles makes it difficult for the non-aviator to recognize how many nautical miles the aircraft may be off cources while still flying within 10 or more nautical miles of the baseline course.
Volcanic eruptions are not all that common. Closing for 1 week for safety concerns does not seem all that bad a decision. In hindsight, in light of the test flights, perhaps alternatives to a complete flight ban could have been made, eg certain longer routes to the same destination, albeit requiring longer flight times might have been permitted, but for logistical reasons, the airlines might have stayed grounded anyways.
BTW, I wonder of those test flights through the ash are insured. Losing a plane without any passengers is probably cheaper than losing 1 with 400 passengers. Perhaps the data will help the models in the future.