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.
An airport wanting to service 400 jumbo jets would need more than ten square miles of parking space for the planes, and over 20,000,000 gallons of jet fuel.
Are you serious? You’re using a strawman to label my argument a strawman???
I never claimed that airplane GPS maps aren’t accurate. I’m claiming that your aviation experience is obviously weak if it’s limited to passenger GPS maps and gazing out the passenger window. And it’s kinda funny that you would use those examples to prop up your credibility with this respect.
Have you ever chosen an alternative airfield? Have you ever determined a fuel load? Have you ever diverted? Have you ever been forced to choose between being overly cautious and getting the mission accomplished?
My only point has been that the Met Office should have been honest about being clueless and simply allowed the experienced decision makers within the aviation field to do their jobs.
Think about it like an intelligence officer not being honest with his commander. It’s not the intelligence officer’s job to substitute his cluelessness with inaccurate assessments in order to be cautious. If there is a lack of good information, then it’s the commander’s (the decision maker’s) job to be cautious. The intelligence officer simply needs to convey accurate information, and that includes accurately conveying what he doesn’t know.
That’s not the point. The point is whether or not agency have been honest about what they do and don’t know.
Actually, no, they didn’t have to rely on computer models which were rendered useless since they were based on dozens of overly conservative assumptions. The modelers should have simply been honest about what they didn’t know.
It shouldn’t have applies for short hall hops across Europe. Your only in the air for an hour or less. Yes the dust was dangerous over Scandinavia but the further south you went the clearer it appears to have been. Ash doesn’t show up on radar but it does show on ladar and some millimetre radars. The air-forces should have had both. Mapping a safe route on an hourly basis with out relying on climate modeling computers, that have a bad track record, should have been done. Transatlantic flights should have been possible via north Africa and the Azores.
The Governments and Airlines also botched the process of quickly getting more trains and buses on the tracks and roads.
The no fly strategy was cooked up for places like Indonesia and the Philippines. Places where you could survive without a flight or two. Europe needed a real plan, it still needs one. No one has noticed yet but people will have died on organ waiting lists.
Hopefully Ladars are being installed in pods that can be mounted on airforce jets to get a better map of the dust. A few in the air could map safe corridors like an Icebreaker opening the way for shipping. With low wind speeds the corridors would not have changed fast.
Raphial Morgado is going to have a big win eventually since his MYT can be configured to run with dust filters on the intakes while still getting several times the power to weight of a jet engine. http://www.angellabsllc.com/index.html
@Phil
‘All longer routes probably requiring stops.’
Uhm and having planes grounded earns you how much money?
‘Yeah sued for doing their job properly which would result in shutting down all the world’s VAAC systems thereby blinding all air traffic to such events!
That’s really smart.’
Where in lies the logic that just because Met-office get sued they’d have to shut down anything? Met-Office is an official entity of the UK gov. there by assuring nothing would be shut down. but it would assure that the information coming from Met-Office would be more sound and reliable in the future, and that is really smart.
wobble (08:27:11) :
Please tell us about your aviation experience flying jumbo jest through ash clouds.
wobble (08:32:19) :
What mechanism do you suggest for determining ash cloud extent and density during the night, when almost all the eastbound long haul flights pass Iceland?
First. I don’t have any experience flying jumbo jets through ash clouds.
Please tell us about your aviation experience flying jumbo jets through ash clouds.
Ash clouds notwithstanding, I have substantial aviation experience flying in that part of the world. Such experience allows me to see the folly in your point about the Seattle-London flight, and it allows me to ask you about a New York-London flight.
I only called you out for asserting authoritative experience based on passenger window/gps gazing despite what you’re being told by many of us with practical experience.
Second. What does this have to do with my point? My point is that the decision makers should have been told the truth, and the truth was that the Met Office didn’t have a clue about the risks.
Third. Your claims that the Met Office did nothing wrong is inaccurate and baseless.
None, if none are accurate.
That’s my point.
And I also condemn the practice of claiming that models infused with overly conservative assumptions are accurate.
wobble (10:48:17) :
You are making all kinds of accusations in various directions without providing any evidence to back them up.
If you are claiming that SEA->LHR flights don’t normally pass over Southern Greenland and then south of Iceland, you are incorrect.
http://www.travelmath.com/flight-distance/from/SEA/to/LHR
Did you not read and understand the information in the link I provided. The GOES-R satellites for one example….
steven,
You really need to slow down.
I’ve never made any claim about a typical flight path. I only ever took issue with your claims about aircraft range, and then I asked you to try apply your same logic to NEW YORK – LONDON flights (which you’ve conveniently ignored). But none of this has ever been my main point.
Stop defending the actions of the Met Office. It doesn’t matter how right you think the grounding decision was. They were wrong to have misrepresented their confidence in their models. They should have admitted their cluelessness and allowed the decision makers to do their job in the absence of information. The outcome may have been the same, but that’s not the point.
D. Patterson (12:07:50) :
Looks like you didn’t read the link you provided. That imagery is not available for Europe and only works if there is no cloud cover.
Also, the article specifically said GOES-West and not GOES-East. But neither satellite covers Europe.
One million people a week pass through LHR. Are you going to bet their lives on your theories?
wobble (12:18:47) :
The decision makers have to plan based on the longest flights. A 767 travelling from the western US to London does not have a lot of extra fuel. BA’s DEN->LHR flight uses a 767, and I have taken that flight a dozen or so times.
Show some evidence that The Met Office misrepresented their models.
Steve,
I have several hundred thousand miles of flying, my first commercial flight was in 1968 from Europe to the USA, as time has progressed so has ”safety” 99% of the ”safety” problems arise from legislators who ‘think’ they know best for a very specialized industry, and have never got off the ground to see how the real thing operates, most have watched the Hollywood version, you know lets scare em to death another time with a airline movie.
I am a married man, with children and grandchildren, when flying a plane I know that all those people behind me have friends and families just like me, I like my life, the airlines and the industry has it rules and regulations which left alone work very well, but when you mix incompetence and politics you get a round hole with a square peg, flying (statistics show) is the safest way to travel, and that includes walking to the corner store, I do not know anybody (apart from terrorists) who work in this industry who would think for one second to do something outside the AIRLINES RULES AND REGULATIONS.
PS all aircraft carry enough fuel to get the pilot home.
George Tetley (12:35:28) :
Everything you said is true. Now please tell us about your experiences flying through volcanic ash clouds.
A 767 has a maximum range of 10,400 km, and my flight from Denver is over 7,000 km. How does that “get the pilot home?”
That’s an absurd assertion.
The decision makers can, instead of restricting all flights, simply require all London bound flights to plan to land with a minimum amount of fuel depending on the type of aircraft (or published max range flight time equivalent given the type of aircraft). Aircraft/flights which can’t plan to arrive in London with the required amount of fuel are restricted from initiating a flight. This would have allowed the airlines to make a business decision based on the requirement to carry extra fuel for the limited number of flights which could meet the minimum requirements.
Now, before you misrepresent my point again. I’m merely saying that this is simply one example of the types of options which are available to the decision makers – despite your claims to the contrary. I’m not, repeat, not claiming that this would have been the correct decision.
They issued depictions of ash plumes which they represented as accurate.
wobble (13:03:52) :
Six days is not a very long time to come up with a set of procedures for dealing with a new paradigm. Flights in Europe are back to 100%. They were appropriately conservative.
But if Katla erupts, the whole thing is coming to a halt.
stevengoddard (12:20:53) :
You said that you are a scientist seeking the truth. Unfortunately. You have a number of people who have tried to help you do so. Unfortunately, you appear to be interpreting these remarks, intended as helpful or not, as some kind of personal attacks. The sarcasm is not necessary. I asked a question. It was not styled as sarcasm. It was not meant as sarcasm. It was a straightforward and plain question which did NOT make a rhetorical assumption that you did not read or understand the link. It was an effort to discover why you appeared to disregard the information found there.
I already acknowledged that the GOES East satellite lacked the critical capabilities of the GOES West satellite when I first mentioned it. That is precisely why I suggested some critics may find the Met Office culpable for neglecting to invest in appropriate observational systems while spending exorbitant sums of money on unreliable computer modeling systems. The necessary satellite and satellite imagery could have been in place when needed. The excuse that Iceland’s volcanic eruptions were unexpected also do not withstand scrutiny. The London center was established for the specific purpose of maintaining a watch over the volcanic ash risk from Icelandic volcanoes.
You keep assuming and saying the volcanic dust is not detectable at night. This is simply not ncessarily the case. Satellites, when suitably equipped, can image some of the denser volcanic ash clouds using infrared imagery. Commercial flights can in many cases observe volcanic ash clouds at night if they are also visible in daylight. The link I provided gave you the procedures for detection and avoidance while inflight. These were provided as just a few samples from a larger number of potential methods already in use for many years and many decades. Thirty five years ago I was using infra red imagery from much more primitive satellites to disseminate NOTAM and SIGMET alerts.
One of those people was my wife’s nephew. He was stranded in London when the European flights were grounded. While neither he or his family have any desire to see him put at unnecessary levels of risk, they seem to understand that the massive scope of the groundings were unnecessary and inappropriate. He has expressed his unhappiness with the situation in no uncertain terms. He is not a tourist. He is traveling on business, and there are consequences when the flights are grounded unnecessarily. He mentioned how the stranded passengers have a far greater risk of being killed as pdestrians in a European crosswalk, in an automobile accident, and in a European train wreck than a crash of an airliner failing to avoid the volcanic ash clouds. Of course, that was his opinion about his own life and risks, which you obviously do not share.
Personally, I’ve flown aboard a commercial flight through the invisible dust of the Mount St. Helens eruption. I’ve flown aboard military flights conducting observations and research during a variety of volcanic eruptions, sandstorms, and great forest fires. The risks while real, proved to be quite manageable. Financial loss for aircraft safety and maintenance has been the far greater risk. Like many situations in life, the risks can be managed and minimized. If you are not satisfied, you can choose to not fly without using state authority to deny other people the right to govern their own lives and make informed decisions about the actual risks they face. Never forget, there are also risks to be faced when saying on the ground and traveling by other means.
What I suggested could have been decided and implemented within 6 hours.
Was your first sentence supposed to somehow give credibility to your second sentence?
Let me be clear, you failed to prove your case that “they” weren’t overly conservative.
Their lives are at risk every single week with or without a volcano ash plume.
And I still want to know the number of people that died because flights were restricted.
Decreased air travel = Increased highway travel = Increased deaths
D. Patterson (13:30:53) :
I don’t see that you are presenting any evidence that during the past week the Met Office did anything wrong. Had a plane gone down, there would have been plenty of evidence.
Let us go “all the way” back to the first day of the shutdown, one week ago:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/15/ash-thursday-the-day-the-uk-was-planeless/
Another article from one week ago :
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Iceland-Volcano-Eruption-Why-Is-Volcanic-Dust-So-Dangerous-For-Aircrafts/Article/201004315602761?lpos=UK_News_Carousel_Region_1&lid=ARTICLE_15602761_Iceland:_Volcano_Eruption_Why_Is_Volcanic_Dust_So_Dangerous_For_Aircrafts
wobble (13:57:38) :
A million people die every year around the world in automobile accidents.
Society has deemed that as acceptable. Society considers one jetliner going down as unacceptable.