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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In defense of Steven Goddard, not that he needs it.
wobble (12:53:16)
(excerpt)
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).
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Hauling around extra fuel cuts into the already minimal profit margin, and doesn’t do any good if the engines aren’t running due to ash injestion.
I agree. One death on the road is an “accident”. One plane going down is hundreds of deaths and is a tragedy, and is unacceptable. (My own opinion is that all car “accidents” are unacceptable and I’ve never had one myself, but that’s only my personal experience).
However, there is a level of risk that is acceptable when dealing with ash clouds, and we need to find that level. This volcano could well be spewing ash for months or years, and the same problem could crop up virtually anywhere at any time. We could go through a phase where Icelandic volcanoes spew ash for decades, and it would be insane to simply stop flying as a result.
CodeTech (15:06:23) :
I agree completely. The Guardian posted a good chronology of how that process worked over the past week.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/21/airlines-battle-skies
@stevengoddard
‘wobble (12:18:47) :
The decision makers have to plan based on the longest flights. ‘
From reading several comments from you to wobble it seems you don’t seem to understand that EU made a directive or rule, of protective measures, out of one single incident, that goes way further it seems than any other country, and even those countries directly afflicted by volcanos.
The directive in itself is probably as sound as can bureaucratically be that doesn’t mean that it was followed correctly by Met-office. Do you know if Met-Office followed the rules correctly? How many measurements and readings did they take above Wales? Scotland? Ireland? Faroe Islands? France? Germany? Portugal? Spain? Denmark?
And please spare us the logic of it being bad flying directly into an ash plume, that just makes the argument ludicrous.
Met-office screwed up. They couldn’t shoulder the weight of the responsibility. And before you blow a fuse, answer this: Did they ever say they couldn’t shoulder the responsibility?
1DandyTroll (15:49:36) :
It is up to the prosecution to prove guilt, not the other way around.
Are you serious?
Are you actually implying that it’s ok to have 1,000 extra highway deaths in order to prevent 90 aircraft deaths?
Such implication is absurd.
You’ve successfully missed the point.
The extra fuel would be used to avoid flying through ash. The cost of the extra fuel is a business decision. It’s certainly not a decision for the Met Office.
“In Exeter, Met Office staff were tracking the plume arriving from Iceland with infrared satellites and 30 ground-based lasers that had been reassigned to monitor volcanic ash instead of the cloud base.
Separately, forecasters were modelling how the plume might spread.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/21/airlines-battle-skies
What about an extra 1,000 deaths caused by the increased highway traffic? Are those 1,000 deaths acceptable?
Do you agree that:
Decreased air travel = Increased highway travel = Increased deaths
wobble (16:26:07) :
If The Met Office gave the thumbs up and one plane went down, it would be a complete catastrophe.
Perhaps uniquely on this thread, I am a pilot who regularly flies across both the Atlantic and Pacific.
There are three main problems with volcanic ash:
— melting in the combustion section and subsequent blocking of cooling passages in the engine
— windscreen abrasion
— invisibility to on-board radar
The last of these is the critical factor, because, in principal, volcanic ash clouds are no more, or less, hazardous than thunderstorms.
Therefore, the EU could have opened airspace under the same rules similar to those that apply to aircraft with inoperative WX radar: day and clear weather. (simplified to avoid a blizzard of pilot talk)
There would have to be an additional restriction which is no different than operating over mountainous terrain: driftdown performance (i.e., the altitude the airplane can fly after the failure of one engine). Just because the ash cloud tops out at, say, 25,000 feet doesn’t mean you can legally fly over it, unless (more pilot talk with caveats about how we can fly over the Himalayas).
As for maneuvering to avoid an unplanned ash cloud encounter en route, in principle this is no different than maneuvering to avoid convective activity. There are well established, and frequently used, procedures to deal with this sort of thing.
So, from the cockpit, I thought the EU’s blanket airspace closure was idiotic, a perfect example of nanny-state risk avoidance run completely amok..
Oh, and one other thing. DTW, JFK, ATL, DIA, DFW and MIA put a lot more flights across the Atlantic than SEA, and all of their great circle routes go well south of Iceland.
wobble (16:29:09) :
u.k.(us) (14:36:27) :
Hauling around extra fuel cuts into the already minimal profit margin, and doesn’t do any good if the engines aren’t running due to ash injestion.
You’ve successfully missed the point.
The extra fuel would be used to avoid flying through ash. The cost of the extra fuel is a business decision. It’s certainly not a decision for the Met Office.
========================
Avoid the ash, land at an alternate airport, and drive back to the original destination?
Circle the destination airport until fuel reserves force a diversion?
Allow all air traffic into a possibly contaminated airspace, and hope for the best?
Wait till an aircraft flames-out, then close the airspace?
IMHO, a tough call.
Hey Skipper (17:47:54) :
I fly from DIA->LHR all the time and the route passes close to Iceland, particularly on the return trip. Same story for San Diego, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
wobble (12:18:47)
…..They should have admitted their cluelessness and allowed the decision makers to do their job in the absence of information. ………….
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decisions were made, apparently by decision makers.
Seems you don’t agree with the decisions made by the makers.
My dab — I meant to type IAD.
Actually, it isn’t.
Every flight you go on is an example of managed risk: thunderstorms are a perfect example.
The EU simply wiped out the managed part and treated risk as certainty. That is idiotic.
Hey Skipper (18:44:27) :
“Every flight you go on is an example of managed risk: thunderstorms are a perfect example.
The EU simply wiped out the managed part and treated risk as certainty. That is idiotic.”
==========================
You are flying into London with severe thunderstorms all over, but with no weather radar. Do you proceed, or wait for the storms to clear? Ground control radar is also blind.
Hey Skipper (18:44:27) :
Thunderstorms are discrete, visible, radar detectable and dangerous.
Airborne basaltic volcanic ash is diffuse,generally invisible, variable in density, not detectable on radar and dangerous.
But Steven, Steven, Steven, Steven, here’s the question.
Why did the Met Office need to give a thumbs down? Why couldn’t they have said that they lack the proper tools to provide an accurate assessment?
A tough call? No wonder your opinion is humble.
Maybe you think we should ground all flights worldwide?!?!?
After all, we never know if the destination airport weather will be better than approach minimums when the aircraft arrives?
I addressed that above. Aircraft do sometimes dispatch without operating weather radar. This is the quote from my aircraft’s minimum equipment list:
In other words, the Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball is a suitable substitute for weather radar when said eyeball can be effective.
Ash clouds insufficiently dense to be seen are not a threat to aircraft safety.
Therefore, during the day, in clear weather, precisely the same kind of risk management should have applied to the ash cloud as to convective weather. Instead, the EU tossed all those considerations overboard.
NB: all the ash cloud run-ins you have heard about were the consequence of getting into unknown areas of high concentration.
For the illustration at the top of this thread to be completely informative, it should include an overlay of the visible extent of the ash cloud and representative air routes across the Atlantic.
The wrong people preempted the right decision makers by misrepresenting their confidence in ash plume forecasts.
wobble (19:41:32) :
Why? Because it is their job.
Hey, Hey Skipper, Steven Goddard thinks it would take too long to have implemented such procedures. I contend that such procedures could have been established within 6 hours. What do you think?
Hey Skipper (20:25:52)
Ash clouds insufficiently dense to be seen are not a threat to aircraft safety.
Read the .pdf in http://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/2010-17
“Flight in airspace with low contamination of volcanic ash may have medium to long term consequences to aircraft safety.” Included are list of daily checks.