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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D. Patterson (23:10:56) :
Suppose a large eruption occurs at night. Tracking the ash plume is not possible with radar. The only way to locate the extent is by visuals (dependent on clear skies) or by computer models.
Hundreds of planes fly east over the North Atlantic at night, and they would have no clue where it is safe to fly. Here is the forecast for tomorrow
http://www.turbulenceforecast.com/atlantic_eastbound_tracks.php
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/ash/properties.html
Are there any pictures of damaged blades from those two incidents?
Realtime advice via radio should be able to warn pilots who are on track to
pass within a specific distance from the ash plume.
See link above for particulate size in relation to distance down wind from volcano.
stevengoddard your understanding of jet Airliner operations is greatly in error. D. Patterson’s understanding is Waaaay closer to reality than yours. I’ve been flying for over 50 years and spent 9 months based in Los Angeles flying the B742(airline jargon) on the KLAX – EGKK route, and did about 40 sectors. AirNZ at the time had about 40 different routes for that sector. The flight planning computer would calculate the minimum cost route and that is the route that we would fly on the day(night mostly). The tracks varied from about 500 nautical miles north of the great circle track to 1000 miles south of it, at midpoint. In flight re-routing at ATC request was quite common. I don’t recall ever seeing another aircraft anywhere between Churchill and nearing UK but was pre TCAS.
Quite a good article, with minor errors.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703816204574487173981612780.html
Anyone who wants to worry should worry about birds. Many people killed and aircraft destroyed. Sully was VERY lucky. I believe 50th percentile(or maybe a lot lower) pilots would have done as well; there were no other choices.
http://www.int-birdstrike.org/Warsaw_Papers/IBSC26%20WPSA1.pdf
http://www.detect-inc.com/birdstrikes.htm
By the way the FAA thinks you( in the vernacular, not personal, meaning) shouldn’t know about bird strikes.
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/367608-faa-proposes-keep-bird-strike-data-secret.html
AirNZ was very lucky to not lose a B742 on take-off from Christchurch in1986 I think. Two engines failed due multiple seagull ingestion. Fortunately one hydraulic air-pump(an allowable deficiency) was unserviceable so they had done a flap 10 T/O. If they had been in normal flap 20 configuration they WOULD have crashed. As it was it was very close.
I have personally had three bird-strike incidents. Worst was a dozen or more Godwits at about 400 feet on T/O runway 23, in a B737, at NZAA. One or more ingested by starboard engine( we could smell the cooking). Engine did not fail. Carried out a visual circuit at 500 ft(nice excuse for a bit of fun) for a safe landing.
I agree with most of what Steve Goddard says, but he has entirely missed the point.
The Met Office was not responsible for closing UK airspace. That was the decision of the CAA, the Civil Aviation Authority.
The role of the Met Office was simply to provide forecasts to guide the CAA in their decision.
The original article suggested that the Met Office’s forecasts were inaccurate, based on flawed computer models. If that is so, then the Met Office deserves criticism. Its responsibility is to provide the best information possible.
In this case it may be that inaccuracy caused us to err on the cautious side, but we cannot be sure it will always work that way.
If the Met Office is blind, it’s by their own misguided choice and over reliance upon computer modeling at the expense of budgets for confirmable observational methods. There are numerous alternatives. To make a long story short, see the following for just one example:
Volcanic Ash Principal Component Imagery – Basic Information
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/research/goes-r/proving_ground/cira_product_list/volcanic_ash_pci.asp
As an aside with respect to aviation:
http://www.nwas.org/committees/aviation/volcanic_ash/Vol_Ash_Enroute_Avoidance.html
Can people stop talking about a ‘dust cloud’? There was no cloud over Europe. A cloud is visible. The skies were perfectly clear. Planes should not fly through an ash cloud obviously but where is the safe distance fron the visible cloud [of ash not steam]?
All this was about was a computer model of traces of ash over europe. The argument is about how much of a trace there was. The authorities went with a zero tolerance, a total over reaction.
We are limited by the technology. When technology advances we will be able to ban flights over huge areas every time a small volcano goes off because it is detectable. Just think of the precedent this sets?
I live over a 1000 miles from the eruption in southern England and our airports were closed – why? This was more than an over reaction it was an embarassing decision based on nothing more than ‘covering your arse’
Many planes have flown though slight traces of ash without the slightest problem, historically [they must have as we had no supercomputers to tell them it was dangerous].
cheers David
>>stevengoddard (15:37:05) :
I didn’t realize that the wind always blows the same direction in Iceland.<<
Regardless of what happens tomorrow or in the future, Keflavik International Airport has yet to close throughout this ash plume concern. It would have certainly been a viable divert field for European bound flights.
Steven, it's laughable that you attempt to assert adequate aviation expertise derived from passenger seat GPS displays and window viewing. Many of us with professional aviation experience don't think you've made a convincing case regarding the actual risk.
Fight us if you wish, but there's a reason we are disagreeing with you.
Again, I want to know the number of highway related deaths that were caused because of the grounded aircraft.
Decreased air travel = Increased highway travel = Increased deaths
>>paul jackson (23:31:20) :
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 it’s such a financial hardship for the airlines to be grounded for safe-sided ash predictions<<
You're missing the point by focussing on financial hardship for the airlines. Grounding the airlines caused financial hardship to hundreds if not thousands of businesses which were disrupted.
The risks should have been accurately assessed for the business decision makers. It's wrong to artificially inflate the risks just because little is actually known about the risks.
stevengoddard (17:00:13) :
Lots of experts posting here who know more about my experiences than I do.
Here is the flight path from SEA-LHR . . .
That “flight path” from “Great Circle Mapper” is not what real airlines use. Here’s the quote from the top of the page, “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.”
Over-the-arctic routes are a bit different, of course, but Wikipedia has an accurate description of the North Atlantic Track System, which carries the huge majority of passengers between North America and Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks
The tracks vary each day, sliding up and down to follow the winds, but they all run parallel 60nm (1 deg latitude) apart with 10 minute spacing between aircraft – that’s about 100 miles. Westbound tracks run more northerly to avoid the winds.
Vertical spacing is 1000 ft, which would look close. If you had a near miss, the report from the traffic controller and both aircraft would be in the system.
I do agree that they did the right thing in the face of not knowing. What I think they and others do deserve criticism for is the total lack of supporting measurements. That should have been in place a long time ago. I know that it might still not have mattered as noone has real data on the effect of different concentrations and distributions of dust/grain size and type but I believe that engeneering judgements would be possible. In the current case, without real measurements everyone was left in the dark and the best option was to stop flying.
A German radio program reported on monday this week, that the European Union had a announced to provide compensatory payments to all air carriers who suffered from the European no-fly zone, except to those who already had been in financial difficulties before.
Gregg E.:
“You volunteering to be on one of those 1 in 1000 planes that’d crash?”
No, but I was willing to take my chances that the plane I chose would not be one of those. In the long run, flying is the safest way to travel. Don’t you know this? You have a higher probablility of getting hit by a meteor than dying in a plane crash!
Besides, even when some as ash did affect a plane, you gotta look at the facts. The fact is, it was all okay in the end. Just like a bit of extreme turbulence. Drop below FL350 using the old 15 degree glide slope trick, spark up the engines again, then land at the safest conginency airport and fill out risk assessment forms. Eezzie Piezzie.
Picture collage of Eyjafjallajokull:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/more_from_eyjafjallajokull.html
Accuracy of the models, one issue. Airline safety, other issue. I think it is great to see the models laughed at in 50 point type. On the other hand, I have flown transatlantic and transpacific flights more times than I can remember, and most of the time is spent over some pretty lonely airspace with available airports for emergency landings few and I don’t think the word “far” in “far between” really covers it, few and vast distances, even for a jet, between.
A one in ten thousand risk is unacceptable for a flight, there would be smoking craters everywhere if it wasn’t. They made the right call, models or no models. Using models was just an extra bit of fluff they didn’t really need, and that only could have given them false confidence.
Just imagine the harm to the airline industry had they gotten it wrong.
In the circumstances described the proper thing to do would be to allow planes to keep fying but redirect them further to the south., possibly requiring them to refuel in the Azores or Spain. That would certainly cause a lot of inconvenience but far less than what we have seen.
In any case I believe that the cloud has been at up to 30,000 ft whereas intercontinental planes can fly at 50,000 ft. The main problem is when they come in to land.
MJK,
You speak as if action on climate is without uncertainties and risks. This is the kind of simple minded rhetoric that gets you warmies into trouble time after time. Unemployment is a leading cause of suicide, for one of many.
As I understand it the NAME model was developed to predict the areas which would be safe in the event of a nuclear explosion, rather than predicting where it would be dangerous. Due to deterministic chaos, it is impossible to know exactly where and how dense the dust cloud will be within the potentially contaminated area, from minute to minute.
In view of the fact that the manufacturers of jet engines had a ‘zero tolerance’ policy to ash until the last couple of days, I agree with Steven that on this occasion the Met Office are not to blame.
wobble (00:33:36) :
That was one of the most impressive straw man posts I have seen yet. You aren’t even remotely addressing any of the issues in the article.
You aren’t discussing volcanoes, ash, the inability to predict or detect ash at night, the uncertainty about short and long term effects of ash, the decision making process, the timeline of that process, etc.
You have instead attached your argument to an incorrect claim that airplane GPS maps aren’t accurate.
Richard Briscoe (00:12:12) :
The “point” is that The Met Office has taken heat, when they did nothing wrong.
acementhead (23:49:26) :
Of course the track varies some depending on winds. How is that in any way relevant to the discussion?
Grumbler (00:30:55) :
Neither the military nor NASA are convinced that the ash levels are safe. An ash cloud can not be picked up by radar, and that is exactly why they had to rely on computer models.
Surely the whole point is that the met office relied on a completely theoretical computer model that was based on much denser clouds of ash and was not able quantify the changing density of ash clouds as they disperse.
On top of this there was apparently no real capability of real time sampling of the clouds and feeding this live data back into the model.
What other computer models are the met office famous for ?
FrankS (06:52:18) :
The point is that Europe was suddenly dealing with a new and unpredictable situation. Every eruption and every hour of an eruption is different than previous ones.
Anders Valland (01:36:28) :
The particulars of the ash from any given eruption can not predicted. This volcano hasn’t erupted for decades. There was no historical information to go by.
I have been reading these comments and one recurring theme is “there should be zero tolerance for volcanic ash” or words to that effect.: and If there is any chance whatsoever of volcanic ash then the aircraft must not fly.
So when we get another Pinatubo or Krakatoa or a similar huge eruption that spreads ash all around the globe lasting in some cases for years – should all flying worldwide cease for those years?
There is a level of volcanic ash that can cause a turbojet to fail no-one should or would want to, fly into an ash cloud of that density. However, as the ash density reduces it becomes a case of engines needing further maintenance and more detailed after flight inspection and this moves the decision making from a SAFETY decision to a COMMERCIAL decision.
There is almost always volcanic ash in the air – just like sand from dust storms which is just as damaging. Sand from the Sahara regularly settles in northern Europe. Calls for ‘zero tolerance’ for ash sound ‘responsible’ but are just demonstrating an ignorance of reality. There are densities of ash beyond which it is commercially punitive to fly and beyond that as density increases it becomes unsafe. The aircraft operators and their flight crews are the correct decision makers on whether to fly and what are the commercially acceptable and safe routes.