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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."
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.
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
At $10M per and a significant fraction of that just to do a teardown and evaluation I'm not sure that anyone wants to fund that kind of research. Perhaps the government could do it with surplus engines from retired F-16's or something.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Yes, but Slashdot tends to represent the .001% of the population that knows more about installing different codecs than getting sunshine, interacting with members of the opposite sex and those other boring activities that we don't have time for.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
$10M is nothing when they're losing something like $200M per day.
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.
It's linked from Wikipedia and they only accept Vorbis/Theora.
Notice that the threat is real - the Finnish air force did get engine damage on their F18:s when they were flying through the cloud. Just take a look here: Finnish F-18 engine check reveals effects of volcanic dust
And we must blame Top Gear for the eruption too.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
to Airbus or Boeing, the limits of flying through an ash cloud might just be a major selling point.
Actually, it'd be far more relevant to Rolls Royce, GE Aviation, Pratt & Whitney and the like.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Yeah, totally. Sand particles are a lot bigger (the volcanic ash particles are around one micron in diameter), so they tend not to occur very far above ground level and are less prone to melting in the engine.
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?
Is it safe to assume that prop planes are not affected by aerial concentrations of volcanic ash? If so, how difficult would it be for the airliner to rent/lease a fleet of prop planes for the duration of this problem? I realize that no prop plane is going to have the passenger capacity of a jumbo jet and that this is a far less than ideal solution. Still, in the face of losing "millions a day" or in terms of "it's either this option or you're stranded here", does it become better than nothing?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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?
I keep hearing from various media about "dire economic impacts" and such. I don't recall the nautical shipping industry panicking like this over the fact that they can't reasonably send ships through a hurricane, and those happen much more frequently than volcanic eruptions of this magnitude. I get the impression that the rarity of this event that the airliners should be thankful for is also the very reason they are overreacting to it.
The problem is that we have become dependent on the 'ready today' ability to move people and goods around the world. Sixty years ago there was no FedEX overnight service that you could reliably depend on. The 1950s Tulip sellers in Holland sold their tulips to customers within a few tens of kilometers of their fields. Today, there are huge international shipping operations that depend on being able to ship those same tulips half-way around the world in less than 36 hours. Florists in Kenya are losing an estimated USD $2 million every day sitting on product that is literally rotting before their eyes.
I'm sure you can find many more examples of industry that is time sensitive and losing out due to this problem. Some examples that come quickly to mind are factories that depend on regular replenishment of components. There is a trend for smaller fabrication houses to stock only enough product to complete a fixed amount of orders. It's more economically reasonable for these small houses to stock only what they need and overnight or 2day more parts as they need them than to stock an indefinite supply. These companies are sitting idle and unable to fulfill contracts. The economic loss that potentially creates is huge. Imagine for a second the cost in lost future contracts, late penalties and loss of sales for a company who's model depends on being able to ship items around the world in less than two days. Now multiply that by all the countries that ship to, from and over europe. That's starting to get expensive.
Don't forget about all the stranded people that aren't getting their work done either. I'm staying at a hotel in Norway right now and I'm surrounded by oil industry people that are stuck here, trying to get back to the UK, France and the USA. They're trying their best to do their work, but there's only so much you can do from a lappy in the hotel loby. You can bet those folks are costing their companies some serious down time. Not only are they not doing their work, they're costing the company money staying in the expensive hotel, eating expensive food. That adds up over 7 million estimated stranded people.
Then there's the the airlines that are already hurting due to bad management, expensive fuel and a struggling economy. They have labor contracts they are obliged to fulfill. Just because their employees aren't flying and servicing, they're still entitled to their salaries. Loan and bond payments are still due even when 90% of your aircraft are sitting at an airport taking up space. You can bet every municipality that runs an airport is still expecting the airlines to pay their airport leases and gate fees even though no passengers are flying. Sum all that up and you're WAY in the red for this month.
Shipping is a slightly different ball game. When you put your stuff on a boat and ship it to Norway from New Orleans (we just did this a few weeks ago), you expect it to arrive at some point in the future. You don't expect it to arrive today, or on 28 April. You expect it to arrive at some point within 6-12 weeks (that's what the shipping company quoted). If you build your business model around that type of speed, you build it very differently. You can bet that a company that relies on shipped goods over airfreight has a much bigger buffer of raw materials and product. When a boat is delayed due to hurricane, crowded port, or whatever, it has an impact, but a much smaller impact. You can bet that a steel mill doesn't rely
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Even if prop planes were unaffected, no-one makes a prop plane with more than a hand-full of seats, all larger prop planes are actually turboprops which would likely have the same problems as jets.
Well, perhaps it's time that corporate shipping planners got a reminder that if you do just in time shipping & supply with zero buffer, eventually the supply chain will blink or shut down for a week due to uncontrollable acts of nature and you'll be boned.
I understand that this doesn't apply to live-shipment items like tulips or medical radioisotopes, but I find it disturbing how much of our economy has been reorganized into something resembling a program that will crash if there's so much as a cache miss in the name of efficiency. Then again, I'm very conservative when it comes to matters of economic robustness - the economy of Vinge's Namqem and the food supply for Asimov's Trantor are my idea of worst-case "how in the name of Christ could anyone anywhere have ever thought this was a good idea?!" scenarios.
I think that's unfair. It's more like:
... ...
:).
;).
Airlines: We think its safe[1] to fly our planes NOW!
ICAO: Really? Let's hear from Boeing and Airbus on what levels of ash are safe for their engines. So over to you Airbus and Boeing.
Boeing:
Airbus:
ICAO: Hello? You guys still there?
Boeing+Airbus: Uh hold on while we do a few tests...
There's plenty of evidence why the airlines aren't allowed to make that call
It's the job of the airlines to push the ICAO to let them fly ASAP.
It's the job of the ICAO to not let them fly till they know it is safe enough.
From what I've seen, the pilots and engineers don't think it's that safe. Few pilots want to find out if they're as good and lucky as the ones who did some gliding in Indonesian airspace
[1] They may think that the economic impact to them of nobody flying after X weeks could be greater than one or two plane problems/crashes.