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Volcano Futures
Now that the volcanic ash cloud is easing off from Europe and airports are re-opening, it's time to look ahead a bit. The first question is, will the Eyjafjallajökull (.OGG) volcano's ash cloud visit the US? According to Discovery News, the answer is: not likely. This article also provides good current answers, as best scientists know, to other questions such as "How long will this volcano keep erupting?" (could be months), and "Will the ash cloud cause cooling in Europe?" (nope). New Scientist looks at the question of whether planes can fly safely through volcanic ash clouds — and concludes there's a lot we don't know. "Ever since a Boeing 747 temporarily lost all four engines in an ash cloud in 1982, the International Civil Aviation Organization has stipulated that skies must be closed as soon as ash concentration rises above zero. The ICAO's International Airways Volcano Watch uses weather forecasting to predict ash cloud movements, and if any projections intersect a flight path, the route is closed. But although it is certain that volcanic ash like that hanging over northern Europe can melt inside a jet engine and block airflow, nobody has the least idea about just how much is too much. After a week of losing millions every day, airlines are starting to ask why we can't do better."
The rest of the planet uses AAC and MP3, insensitive clod!
Seriously, Vorbis and Theora are not supported by default on either Windows or Mac OS X, so it's really a PITA to use those formats for 99.999% of the users.
One does not simply FLY into Europe!
Maybe we can't do better because the design of a jet engine is to suck in as much air as possible with tiny blades, compress it, then spit it out at an extremely high temperature that happens to remelt ash?
After a week of losing millions every day, airlines are starting to ask why we can't do better.
Airlines: We want open airspace.
ICAO: Sure, you guys fund the study.
Airlines: ????
ICAO: *Profit*
Sounds pretty open and shut to me on a serious note. Red Tape at it's best.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I was hoping this was about a new market in futures contracts opening up.
After all, I am strangely colored.
You geeks should probably have a clear concept of how volcanoes work. It's like a gigantic pool of molten sebum seething and swelling just under the surface of the earth. When this sebum reaches a vent or finds a weakness in the skin, it erupts pus and bacteria all over. In some areas, these "pimples" are very common. Many can be found on or near the so-called Ring of Fire.
After erupting, the area is still tender and prone to subsequent eruption, but a treatment of peroxide and salicylic acid can help clear it up and prevent infection.
As I was saying, just because one volcano calms down on one side of the Earth, another volcano may be getting closer to eruption on the other side (Yellowstone). If you think pimples on your face are bad, wait until you get one on your ass.
Anyone else hit Eyjafjallajökull about 15 times?
Every time people ask why we fund the space agencies, here is your answer. The majority of the data we DO have in this situation is from downlooking satellites from ESA and NASA.The The Deep Space Climate Observatory was mothballed for almost a decade and yet it has sensors on it that could be helping significantly with measuring ash density source. There are several other vehicles that can help significantly with this and other problems that cost many, many times the project cost, but all people see is the big number at the end of each budget, not the benefits.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Had they permitted a plane to fly, and it crashed, the outcry of permitting a plane to fly when we knew about the risks posed by volcanic ash...
But this wasn't even volcanic ash, it was volcanic glass, the effect would be sandblasting the engine while in operation. The safe option was to keep planes on the ground.
Fly or stay grounded - either way, whiners will whine.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
And it is overdue.
Global warming and volcanoes are related.
Lets give it a couple of years, say 2012.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Is this testable by putting an engine in a wind tunnel, and then testing for damage at various concentrations of ash?
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
Offtopic like a fox, maybe!
After a week of losing millions every day, airlines are starting to ask why we can't do better.
Tell you what. Let all the bean counters volunteer to get into a jet and fly back and forth through an ash plume until the engines fail and the jet crashes, killing everyone.
THEN ask that stupid fucking question again.
The reason nobody can say is there's no metrics for uptake by a jet and no guarantee that the ash plume is going to be consistent with whatever testbed is set up.
Honestly, losing millions a day? Do they want to invest a couple billion a year (if not a month) into testing every plausible (and some implausible) ash-to-air-to-engine-intake ratio for every commercial jetliner extant?
With various air carriers already cutting finances close to the bone, I don't think they really have the money to spend on this kind of research or on remediation methods and practices for overhauling engines on planes after scenarios like this.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As many people in the United States with immigrant ancestors know, the government is going to have to naturalise the volcano's name if the ashes pass Ellis Island.
Get ready for Mt. Ekull.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
They were hoping the US Govt. would make a substantial investment, what with that being In the Public Interest(tm). Everyone knows that all the taxpayers in the US all fly commercial airplanes almost every day.
Just curious, would piston engined planes not have a problem with this?
Fire up an old DC-3. I don't suppose they had air-filters though? and ash is probably hard on the prop?
Sent from my PDP-11
Started testing this like a week ago? Really how hard would it be to mount a jet engine and start tossing different amounts of ash in to it in varying concentrations. Really odd that they all seem to be gazing at the ash cloud dumbfounded by it.
Good for something to point to when I hear a European going on about how great Europe is though.
And I thought a box office futures mark was ridiculous. Now we have volcano futures?
The reason nobody can say is there's no metrics for uptake by a jet and no guarantee that the ash plume is going to be consistent with whatever testbed is set up.
No. The reason nobody can say is there's been essentially zero reason to DO the controlled tests until possibly now. How often do ash clouds interrupt busy air traffic corridors? Never?
I guarantee you that if ash clouds were an every day occurrence, the limits of the technology to fly through them would be well known. Since it's rare, they aren't. It's no more complicated than that.
AccountKiller
That's the question I have. Your budget is 1+ billion.
Yeah, tell that to the first nation that starts mining the asteroid belt or mars for ore. You could do it with all robots but you still can't repair and maintain them, so someone is going to be out there.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It seems amazing that we have avoided something like the 1783 eruption that lasted for two years and killed over a hundred thousand. Can you imagine air traffic disrupted for years? BTW, the same thing could happen to us from the Aleutians.
Some think so. Icelandic volcanoes seem to go through cycles, and a high activity one could be starting. Maybe this volcano alone could not be so bad, but more and for long time could have severe consequences, in economy and maybe global climate.
What conditions would you like?
hot day/cold day
high altitude/low altitude
new engine/used
ash concentration
hours of continuous operation
max/nominal/min power
snow/ice/rain
And now do this for each engine/aircraft variant, for a condition that is currently avoidable and rare.
This ash cloud from the Iceland volcano has caused engine damage. I wonder if airlines are throwing caution away to avoid the daily loss in business.
Banu
Honestly, losing millions a day? Do they want to invest a couple billion a year (if not a month) into testing every plausible (and some implausible) ash-to-air-to-engine-intake ratio for every commercial jetliner extant?
I think you're confused about who "they" are.
The airlines have never been in the business of testing anything.
In this case "they" are the engine mfgs &/or the government.
Since the MFGs are saying "don't use our engines under these conditions,"
even if airports weren't shut down, no airline's insurance carrier would cover damage anyways.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You can't live a life without risk. Nor is the avoidance of risk worth any price (otherwise we'd drive a tank at 5km/hr while wearing a helmet and a flak jacket to go to the corner store for milk.) (And then not drink the milk for fear it was contaminated.) Ask all those people stuck in the wrong part of the world whether they'd take a flight if the chance of dying was 1 in 100,000 rather than the normal 1 in 9,000,000. I think you'd find most of them would accept it as a worthwhile risk.
Also, not flying is not a no-risk option. Pharmaceuticals are almost always shipped by air. Soon people will start dying as drug stockpiles run out.
"Have we erred too far on the side of caution" is NOT a "stupid f***ing question".
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
That doesn't stop the tree roots on my porch how is it going to with stand the pressure produced from molten rock, ultra hot gasses etc? Even if it would how do you get it to set without melting into the already molten rock?
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Hmm, it already melted through 100 miles or so of mostly solid rock, so we are going to stop it by putting a few feet or tens of feet skim coat of far weaker material with a lower melting point?
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/why-cant-planes-fly-through-volcanic-ash-because-nasa-tried-once
In other news, Iceland's financial sector nearly collapsed when it was revealed that Geöldmaan Skandiabanken sold trillions of Krona's worth of volcano-backed CDO's to unsuspecting investors. At the heart of the controversy -- notorious short-seller, Jón Pjollsson.
It's not just the airline bean counters who are worried about this. I'm being directly affected. I was in Europe for work, and was supposed to fly back to the US last Sun. I've been stuck here since. I'm quite desperate to get back home and back to my life.
It may seem cool to be stuck in Europe, but in actuality it's not. It feels semi-prison like in that I'm stuck in a place (albeit a very nice, historical and cultural one) and unable to get home. Things are going on at work, with friends, family and I'm all the way over here spending money like crazy because everything costs more when traveling (hotels, meals, phone calls, hotel internet charges, etc). I'm just lucky because I was traveling for work and can expense. I've met others here who aren't so lucky (one forms a sense of camaraderie with other stranded passengers on meets).
And it's a lot of other industries and businesses too. The world is incredibly interconnected.
The main complaint isn't from some bean counters trying to override safety. It's that a blanket ban is just unrealistic and misinformed. There has to be somewhere between NO FLIGHTS and NORMAL. What is it? Are there safe corridors? Are there certain types of planes that can fly? Are there certain elevations? Noone knows, and worse yet, noone is really tracking the ACTUAL ash cloud, it's all just computer models predicting. Let's see where the damned thing actually is.
Those are some of the complaints the airlines, and now us passengers who've been glued to the news for almost a week, are wondering.
The fact that so many flights flew ok yesterday indicates that the whole situation wasn't carefully thought through. Look, I'm all for putting safety first. If there is a good chance I'll die flying, I'll agree to be stuck in Europe for another month until it's safe. But, please can we first make sure it really is that dangerous?
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Do they want to invest a couple billion a year (if not a month) into testing every plausible (and some implausible) ash-to-air-to-engine-intake ratio for every commercial jetliner extant?
That's an interesting number, I'd like to see how you come up with that number for doing research.
Personally I'd be interested in getting more detailed information about how volcano ash hurts a jet engine. We know that enough of it can cause engine failure, and at some point the ash concentration gets so small it has no effect. How small is too small? Do different kinds of ash have different effects? These are interesting questions, and if someone wants to research them, I'd like to hear the answers.
Qxe4
It's useless to argue about details of this cover-up.
Two extraordinary, unprecedented events having something to do with airplanes happened in immediate succession.
1) Higher part of the Polish elite (including the president of their national bank) was shot down over Russia by means yet unknown.
2) Flights over almost ALL territory of Europe were grounded after a mediocre eruption on a remote island. Eurobureaucrats tried to explain it in a way that nobody could ever check it without large-scale modeling and access to actual raw data from the site. The ash is largely mythical, as was proven by Lufthansa test flights. There were only 3 (three!) cases of volcanic ash hitting engines of aircraft, and all three happened when the said craft was flying through the stream of ash, not somewhere in 2000 km away from it.
Either European leaders wanted a reason to avoid the funerals in Krakow and making businesses lose billions of euros was considered an acceptable price (somewhat plausible as even Merkel refused to travel by car -- come on, it's only 400 km!). Were they too disgusted to stand there with a murderer (Medvedev)? The alleged disruption just came in handy.
OR there is something else, far more sinister. What would your [dark conspiracy] versions be?
I posted about this above, but "cutting finances close to the bone" is an understatement - most of the legacy national carriers are bleeding money and are pretty much heading for a sharp impact with bankruptcy in the near future. Because they used to be national symbols and people live quite some time I would imagine a lot of politicians have been getting calls from old pals who aren't happy to see an acceleration towards the ground.
Some scientist in the Netherlands has stated that the whole problem is overhyped. Yes of course it is dangerous to fly through an ash-cloud within 100 miles from the vulcano, but after some days (and that is what we are talking about) most of the big particles in the cloud have fallen to the earth, and the rest has been deluted to such an extend that there is no acute danger. Planes also regularly fly through other dust clouds (from deserts) and that too is not a reason for planes to be grounded.
It looks like Eyjafjallajökull has stopped producing ashes (at large quantities) now that lava is flowing out vulcano. But its 'Big Sister' Katla could erupt as well. Eyjafjallajökull erupts less often than Katla (which erupts every 40 to 80 years) and in all known cases that Eyjafjallajökull did erupt, Katla did follow. Katla mostly erupt is the fall we the ice layer is the tinnest. Locals believe Katla will erupt soon. In the past days tremours have been detected around Katla and in the past months GPS stations around the vulcan have measured a displacement away from the vulcano. All signs that something is happening beneath Katla.
From what I can tell via google,
- Ash melts at 1100 degrees, below operating temperature of jet engines, and fuses into the engine
- Windshields can be abraded so badly you cannot see out of them
- Ash is dry and doesn't show up on radar, so new sensors are needed so pilots can discover it
- There are no standards for how much ash is allowed or how to test aircraft against it.
- Possibility that propellor planes and helicopters are safer
So my conclusions for now are:
- Need better rules, and government should pay for the experimentation
- Need better intelligence, so we can be sure a route is safe
- Need to examine flying propellor planes slowly at very low altitudes below the ash
- Nobody has thought about ash bothering ground transportation. Does it?
- Need alternative transportation
o Trains, buses, boats
o Slower aircraft.. hovercraft or balloons? (they still have engines though)
o Need a closed engine design. (chemical or hydrogen powered electric closed engine?)
o This is a common problem, more needs to be done for global transportation security. I even found a volcanic explosion in Japan yesterday at the ash advisory center, though it is not in the news at all.
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/svd/vaac/data/TextData/20100420_SAKU_0403_Text.html
Links:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/412103-ash-clouds-threaten-air-traffic.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/apr/15/volcanic-ash-bad-for-planes
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=2055888944
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/VAAC/vaac.html
Meanwhile, someone on Wall Street skims this article and reads the title...
Volcano futures! Damn, I'll tell my broker to put all my money there, much safer than derivatives of prune juice futures!
Johnson! Put all my money in volcano futures, I hear they're going up for at least a month or so! Johnson! Don't argue with me, just put my money into volcano futures. What, no one's selling them? Hot damn - call Iceland, let's buy up the whole thing and start packing them up!
I'm beginning to see why our economy nearly collapsed :)...
you can take a cargo ship to NYC and get there in 4-5 days for $900.
you can fly to dubai/SA and get to NA via that route.
you can fly from scotland to canada and get to the USA via that route.
everyone has options -- if youre desperate enough you can exercise them.
Given that I already had three cars totalled by some idiot rear-ending me while I was waiting at a light, I might very well go for the tank option soon. Next fucker to rear-end me gonna get ground into dust by my new tank's threads - after bouncing off the reactive armor. Eat that! ;)
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The first question is, will the Eyjafjallajökull (.OGG) volcano's ash cloud visit the US?
Of course, the second question is will my fart reach the US?
I'm sure the regulators will let the airlines fly once:
1) The plane and plane engine manufacturers let them know what levels of ash are OK.
2) The weather people say what levels of ash are out there.
3) It is reasonable to believe that 2 < 1 in 99.9% of the flight paths.
Or
4) There's extremely little ash out there.
If they allow flights without the above, then they're not doing their jobs properly.
They resume flights. Things appear perfectly normal. In a few weeks time, small numbers of engine failures and instrument and control failures start happening, apparently randomly. It is said to have no relation to the dust. It is very hard to track down the cause, or tell if its unusual for some reason, or just statistical noise, because the planes have been flying all over the world, not just in the affected areas. A few weeks after that, we have three or four total engine failures at once over built up areas in Europe. Or maybe over the Atlantic. People meet and consider what to do.
Then a 747 goes down in the middle of the Atlantic.
Well, we can't play by natures terms forever... Merely putting a slab of concrete on top would be like placing the lid on the kettle while boiling acid.. But clearly there are always ways to solve any problem..
By constructing a lightweight deployable (cheap) dome or tripod with a tarp cover could easily stop the ash... (in simplicity). Ash is expelled by water coming in contact with the magma.. but maybe by pumping in even larger amounts of water you'd be able to create a humidity that would cause the ash to rain down again... or maybe leading the magma out through man made ducts... countless options and far cheaper than letting this happen again. I'm no engineer (yet) but surely someone could come up with a plausible solution.. it's better than just waiting and hoping for the best.
We can. It's called not putting your eggs in one basket and developing high speed rail.
Thanks for posting the link to the Finnish F-18 engine photos. The airborne dust is clearly accreting in molten globs on hot section parts. These mixed oxide/silicate blobs may react with hot section materials - not sure what the specific materials are in the F-18 engines, but they're commonly nickel-based superalloys, often with ceramic thermal barrier coatings. I think the volcanic material might form eutectic (lower melting point) compounds with either the thermal barrier coatings or the underlying alloys. This won't cause outright engine failure, but it could easily lead to accelerated blade or combuster erosion, requiring more frequent maintenance. It will also degrade fuel efficiency. Not such a big impact on military flight operations, as they will have little trouble getting extra funding for this unforseeable circumstance, but the airlines will see additional maintenance requirements eat very quickly into their bottom lines. AFAIK, there's not much of a database on turbine engine degradation modes due to long-term flight through sub-micron volcanic dust.
It's not like they don't want to know where the cloud is. The damn thing just don't shows on weather radars. We simply don't have the technology to do that.
Here's a few for you.
CO2 output from volcano's have not varied wildly meaning their effect on Global temperatures is minimal.
CO2 from eyjafjallajokull vs CO2 from Europe's airline industry.
I guess these aren't the citations the OP was looking for.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
1. Anthropomorphic global warming is not relevant. Any significant climate change due to any reason can have unforeseen economic consequences for HNIs, high-profile investors and Wall Street types.
2. Iceland was recently getting screwed over by the Brits and the Dutch. The rest of Europe turned a blind eye. Now a harmless volcanic eruption in Iceland is screwing Europe over. Karma seems to exist.
3. There cannot be a stronger case for magnetic levitation trains as a more reliable alternative mass transport system for long distance travel.
4. This is also a strong case for distributed electricity grids / smart grids
5. Someone or the other will be thinking about the effectiveness of climate warfare and this will be disastrous because the climate is a fickle unpredictable beast. Some ass will authorize research into climate warfare and create hell for his own or some other country. Anyone speaking about this possibility will be called a nutjob or "unpatriotic"
6. All major cities of the world are located on fault lines. And many are port cities. The whole climate change debate gets a new meaning now, given the way the winds have carried dust and smoke over a sea and across an entire continent.
Conclusion:
This volcano, although disturbing in the short term, is a great blessing in disguise - at least after losing millions in profits over weeks, the rich elite will realize that they have to actually cooperate with clean energy and mass transport lobbies in order to sustain their levels of income or profits.
Thank God for the volcano.
actually, ash from the volcano has already hit north america, if not the US just yet. take a look at the maps below - there are flight advisories for atlantic Canada because of a bunch of ash that has floated west - and it's getting damn close to Maine: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/aviation/vaac/vaacuk_vag.html .
OK, any suggestions on how we do that?
You're stuck on an expense account in a very nice, historical and cultural place and you're this upset? I can understand maybe feeling out of place and wanting to get home to the family and all but it sounds a bit like an overreaction.
What about chewing gum?
This is a combination of an engineering and a weather prediction/measurement problem. Like the issue of bird strikes, the engineering issue can be worked on by doing experiments with testbed engines or other aircraft parts in wind tunnels. For birds, they toss chickens into a running engine and confirm that it will still operate, or will at least safely shut down, if birds of various sizes are ingested. They need to do exactly the same thing for volcanic ash. Set up an engineering simulation and toss some ash into that thing while running. Do various densities, compositions, and plenty of engine inspections and teardowns after. Hopefully the high economic impact of this recent volcanic event demonstrates that it will be worthwhile to do it, and it wouldn't surprise me if plans for such experiments are already underway.
What I'm unimpressed by is all the second-guessing that is now occurring -- airlines and passengers blaming the authorities for completely shutting down the airspace for days as if this was wrong. No, that *was* the appropriate thing to do given the great uncertainty about the ash distribution and its effects. They did the right thing to run a few experiments with aircraft that weren't fully loaded with passengers, and *then* reconsider the original, very cautious approach. The hyperbole is mostly because the airlines hope that they'll be bailed out, so of course they have to show some outrage first and point fingers so it is the "government's fault" for acting cautiously.
What doesn't make sense is why, given the ongoing (elsewhere in the world) and VERY predictable eventuality of ash plumes over major flight paths, and the expected severe economic effects on travel and airline revenue, the airlines and aircraft manufacturers haven't invested more money into studying what happens when aircraft encounter ash, especially the engines. They're happy to blame the government for closing down the system based on limited information, but what did the airlines and manufacturers do beforehand to scientifically characterize the nature of this risk so that when it happened there was plenty of information on which to base a decision? Hardly anything. At least the governments of the world had set up the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center in the 1990s after the risk became clear, so the monitoring system was reasonably well established. By contrast, the engineering side truly lags behind. There's no excuse for that when you could be burning through $200 million/day because you don't know what ash concentration is safe for a jet engine to ingest, or what kind of revised maintenance schedule might be necessary.
Ash is dry and doesn't show up on radar, so new sensors are needed so pilots can discover it
Actually, that problem is solved by the Swiss, they do it with lasers.
For the rest, yup, good summary. The main issue is that we're dealing with something that never before had such an impact, so it's time to do the research that wasn't done with earlier eruptions: just how dangerous is it? What I did *not* find acceptable was airlines claiming it was "all safe" because they managed to get a few planes fly unharmed.
Without some science to measure the variables involved this amounts to stating that it's OK to cross the road blindfolded because two people have managed to survive it before, without any data on time of day, day of the week and whether cars swerved to get out of their way..
Anyway, let's see what the second eruption looks like..
Thanks for the summary.
Insert
Balloons.
it's in my head
The stuff you mention has nothing to do with Europe - it's a consequence of being stuck anywhere in the world.
Europe might be more expensive than being stuck in some 3rd world country, but I suspect it's just as expensive being stuck in the US or Japan.
AFAIK, there's not much of a database on turbine engine degradation modes due to long-term flight through sub-micron volcanic dust.
Engines are rated for no ash in the air. Besides the engine, degradation on the external and control surfaces are not rated too. Probably this will generate more studies, but I really doubt any airplane component is going to be approved to operate on non-zero ash concentrations due to safety reasons.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Maybe because the customers buying planes and turbines (i.e. airlines) did not give a damn up to now?
Volcanic ash is quite usual in a few places, but they never complained about grounded planes _there_. Why? No economic incentive. Now that it has hit Europe, they lose money big time. Now they care.
This is amazing. I used to own an aircraft salvage biz, parting out corporate jets (Learjets, Falcons, etc.). The smallest bit of FOD can DESTROY a motor, very quickly. These operators know that, and would risk lives for $$. Disgusting...
Enlightenment is a pipe dream. So where's the pipe?
It was my understanding from the Discovery channel episode of Mayday, that the 1982 flight mentioned in TFA had problems from static electricity. Apparently the friction caused by the ash moving along the fuselage caused static electricity to build up and interfere with the electronics.
Efficient is fragile. The unexpected is not factored in.
This also applies to information infrastructure - which is rapidly becoming more and more important.
Deep down, I'm worried about our civilization growing ever-more efficient and interconnected. There is not enough focus on robustness and self-sufficiency.
I predict that we are heading for a big (and utterly unexpected) event that will trigger a cascading collapse.
Just makes me a bit worried from time to time...
I lost my sig.
Ash in the turbines==glass deposits on the turbines==plane fall down, go boom.
Best Slashdot Co
It took this long for the airlines to look closer at what is ok and what is not, wow....that's thinking ahead, as soon as it erupted there should have been activity of the highest degree (best engineers) looking over all the stats.....now after this many losses, it sort of like
flogging the long deceased horse...no one will travel yet again, because for the airlines to keep making money you will now have to pay 4 times the amount for an airline ticket then you used to....
Why cant they just fly beside the cloud instead of just grounding altogether the planes....i know it is big, but it is not that big, just refuel along the way, or add connections bypassing the cloud....may cost some money, but alot less then what you are now loosing in revenue!!!
And if you use Winamp you will be able to play OGG files
And also if you use Firefox. Which is very likely the browser with which this page has been viewed.
Since the introduction of HTML5 (in version 3.5), Firefox supports OGG containers and Vorbis and Theroa codecs out of the box (well. very easy as all of these are supported by opensource libraries and are patent-free).
So just click on the link and it plays. No need for external player (well, that was the whole point of HTML5's Audio/Video tags and corresponding built-in codecs).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Everyone seems to be fixated on is it safe to fly through the ash cloud, and how much is too much. They are all focusing on how much ash it would take to cause a crash. What about how much ash would it take to do lasting damage to the engines that might cause it to crash a week/month/year later as the glass buildup wore away at the very precise bearings and compressor parts. Would anyone like to be on the next few flights of a plane that went through an ash cloud that was deemed "safe enough?"
Suck it up enjoy your holiday - being an american your boss will treat it as your annual leave anyways.
Let's get objective for a moment. The stuff that comes out of a volcano is immensely variable in composition -- many of the thousands of rock types on our plant started as lava -- some rather benign and others highly toxic and corrosive -- and with differing melting temperatures and pH. Some volcanic plumes are loaded with droplets of sulfuric acid and other nasties -- this particular volcano apparently has significant fluorine -- one of the nastiest elements that exist. There have been plane crashes involving aircraft that frequent places like Hawaii, caused, they say, by corrosion from the salty particles in the air from sea spray. One size can't fit all when it comes to potential harm to an aircraft from a cloud from an eruption. And as in the Hawaii example, it can be a cumulative condition over time as well as the widely-publicized catastrophic failures during flight. I'm all for prudence when air safety is concerned. Perhaps those who depend upon "just-in-time" everything need a model with room for delays, and alternative supply lines.
The ICAO has been trying to address this issue for several years now. Up until a week ago, the airlines never showed the slightest bit of interest:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/21/airlines-flights-ban-airspace
From the perspective of the airlines, volcanoes have been a rare occurrence that results in the occasional flight being cancelled, meaning that it has been cheaper to just tolerate the occasional cancellation or emergency landing than to research the issue (the engine manufacturers have no incentive to do so unless potential customers start caring).
After years of not giving a damn about the issue (the zero-ash rule was introduced after the incident with BA flight 9 in 1982, 28 years ago), suddenly it's the government's fault that there hasn't been any research and/or that they can't do the research in a few days.
Even if they do the research, it's entirely possible that the results could show that even very low quantities of ash pose an unacceptable hazard. If that's the case, I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of the government officials responsible for aviation.
It's interesting to note that, in spite of not being bound by the CAA/NATS restrictions, the USAF also ceased most operations from its UK bases over the last week, diverting a number of flights coming from Afghanistan.
Would the people underneath their flight path agree?
I fully agree that life carries risk, it's just a matter of being smart about those risks. In this case, we can't tell people the odds are one in 100,000 because we don't know that. Might be one in 10,000 or one in 1000 (it could even be one in 1,000,000).
As for why can't we do better, I didn't see any offers of money for the studies the airlines want, did you? As usual, large businesses want the public to foot the bill for that. And that's the real point of the OP. I'm sure the engine manufacturers will be happy to do those studies just as soon as their customers are happy to pay for them, either directly or built in to the price of the engines.
It's also worth noting that the various aviation authorities are well aware of the urgency and have been permitting flights on a limited schedule for air freight. As the worst of the ash is dissipating they're also starting to open things up for passenger flights.
Overall, the question isn't stupid, but when you know how to get the answer and you haven't done it it becomes silly to ask.
8 hours waiting for the lift to work today ; expecting another 8 hours tomorrow.
It is so, so different to a week of fog.
Not.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
And thank you very much, and for finding that link about lasers. As I have 4 family members stuck in Europe waiting to fly home to the U.S., I hope nobody skimps on the safety margins.