Slashdot Mirror
Was Flight Ban Over Ash an Overreaction?
HaymarketRiot writes "Richard Branson has claimed that the flight ban, due to the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull, was an overreaction on the part of the authorities. Britain's government has even called for the airlines to be compensated. This does look like a perfect excuse for already greedy airlines to try and get more money ... any experts care to comment on the effect of volcanic ash on planes?"
If one had flown and crashed, everyone would have blamed the governments involved for not stopping all the traffic. While I am no fan of the government, this is one where they could not win.
Grimjack
In the wild there are no dumb lions tigers or bears. Only humanity subsidizes the continued existence of the stupid.
If you're not sure, and you don't have time to do the tests necessary to make sure, then it's usually best to err on the side of caution. It's very plausible that ash particles and other ejecta could interfere with the normal and safe operation of an aircraft. And you cannot simply pull over and make a pit stop if your aircraft breaks down unexpectedly while you're 10km above sea level - the closest possibility is "pray to god that physics doesn't say you're about to become very, very dead."
This is a barefaced cash grab, nothing more. What were they going to do if it turned out to have a very dangerous effect on the plane anyway, bring the passengers back as zombies and comp them a free flight?
The chances are that at least one slashdot poster is qualified to comment. Lots and lots of users, topic is a field that many people are employed in, and many of them engineers or techies of some variety.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Planes are one of the safest means of transportation. This is reached by systematically evaluating all risks. The exact effect of vulcanic ash on the various types of engines seem not to be known. Normally engine failures are not correlated on a signle plane. However there have been examples of planes loosing several (or all) engines at onces when flying trough volcanic ash. This means that this (unknown) risk does not enter in the usual power law for several redundant systems. Moreover its known that in influences sensors of the plane. A loss of sensors caused the crash of the Air France flight some time ago. If several engines fail at once of the sensors fail in a fatal way, people may die.
The logics for this must be: "Do we for sure that a plane can operate as designed under these conditions?" instead of "do we know fore sure its dangerous?"
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.
Richard Branson should fly through an ash cloud and let us know.
Only when it's to banks.
Or car companies.
Or anyone else who puts money in politician's pockets.
Yes, those jet engines are just big hollow tubes with absolutely no moving parts! No blades, compressors, widgets - it's like magic! And even if there was anything in this jet engine, all parts are undoubtedly coated with Teflon! As an added design bonus, nothing can pit them, especially small bits of glass being sucked in/expelled out at speeds that would remove all traces of flesh from a humanoid! Sorry. could not resist.
I find the greedy airlines bit in the summary to be rather offensive. I'm sure more than a few local European airlines will go bankrupt because of what happened. And billions of dollars of potential revenue were lost. Airline companies haven't exactly been rolling in it of late....remember when the high oil prices nearly ran a few of them out of business a year or two ago? These airlines employ thousands of people who are just trying to get by, just trying to make a living, and as companies, they run razor thin margins. And then there are the thousands of travelers who were trapped, burning through their wallets living out of a hotel who couldn't get back home. And the summary basically implies that this is all about greed. This story isn't about greed: it's about survival - people trying to make a living despite a crazy natural disaster that had a very negative impact on many, many people's lives. These people feel like the government was overly aggressive about shutting down air space and didn't sufficiently consider the magnitude of effects it would have on the airlines and the travelers. If the government made a mistake here and it had severe financial implications for lots of people, then government ought to take responsibility for its actions and compensate them.
Branson: The shutdown of airspace was a massive overreaction that needlessly cost us large amounts of money and we should be compensated.
Slashdot geek: Branson is being a greedy corporate pig that doesn't care about lives and wants a bailout.
He should be replaced!
Branson: It cost us enough that we're shutting down Virgin Galactic and there will be no suborbital space tourist flights.
Same Slashdot geek: Those overcautious government nanny state meddlers wasted so much money on a needless overreaction, and are scuppering private development of space.
They should be replaced!
Where the atmosphere is concerned, every model is flawed for some given value of "flaw". Sure, the dimensions of the ash plume were certainly exaggerated, but how much exaggerated and where?
Knowing you've overstated the aggregate risk to the public doesn't necessarily imply that the groundings were unnecessary, because you don't know *which* groundings averted disasters. Put another way, suppose you know that 90% some set of flights are safe, but you don't know *which* flights. Grounding 100% of those flights is necessary, even though ignoring the problem only endanger 10% of them.
If one of these events happened every year, you'd expect the people who decide these things to use the data to get more and more precise control. This is a once or twice a century event, so we can't expect to have precise information to act on. It's too bad that this is going to cost the airlines money, but in the middle of a rare, short term situation like this is not the time to question the computer models.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They should have let the industry decide! Nothing ever goes wrong when you make your decisions based on your bottom line.
Unfortunately finding the one slashdot member who is qualified amongst the blather from those who are unqualified and yet still offer their opinion as fact makes it a futile task.
For a prime example, see timmarhy's post above mine.
I ain't engine expert nor volcanologist nor geologist, but I'd rather think more than twice before pouring sand into my car's engine.
Suffice to say that if my car engine dies, only the engine conks, the rest of my car don't break up in pieces.
But if an airplane's engines die, it'll crash, and everyone inside the plane gonna die with it.
That old British hippie is getting way too greedy.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We already have evidence of at least one plane nearly crashing due to volcanic ashes. Is this guy saying that we should take the chance? Would he say that to the families of those who could die because of it?
We have evidence of planes crashing for a wide variety of reasons, some of which were never explained at all. Are you saying we should continue to allow planes to take off when we have reason to believe one will eventually crash? Should any family allow any of its members to ever fly again given that flying is a slightly risky endeavor? /sarcasm
Life has risks. Get over it.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Did Airbus and Boeing say what levels of ash were OK?
If they don't say it's OK, you can't fly their planes through ash unless there's practically no ash.
AFAIK the regulators did their jobs properly.
The pilots and airplane engineers were singing a very different tune from the bosses of the airlines.
And to go along with your post, the British Airways flight was about 100 miles from the volcano, and all 4 engines started up again after they were out of the ash. One of them failed again, but they were able to make it safely to an airport on their own power rather than strictly gliding.
That's great for 4-engine planes like the 747, A340 and A380. What about the twin-engines used for shorter-haul flights?
I thought the travel blackout was a little too knee jerk. I don't know how high the ash got in the atmosphere, but I'm thinking that there would be a more or less safe zone either above or below the main concentration of ash. Then there is the bigger safe zone away from the main corridor the ash is traveling. They might have needed to make adjustments to flight plans, but I think that they could have had a much smaller no-fly zone. Of course I am not even an aerospace janitor, so what do I know?
There had never been extensive testing done to determine safe levels of volcanic ash, so they could not, on a few hours notice, set up "safe zones" with any confidence. In those same first few hours they also might not have had the detailed maps and analyses of ash concentrations and altitudes that we saw in the days after.
Granted I'm not an aerospace janitor either, but given the little they knew at the time, which included direct knowledge of what can happen when flying near volcanic eruptions (British Airways 9 and KLM 867), IMHO they really had no choice but to issue a complete ban until at least some tests were done without using paying passengers as guinea pigs.
The Federal Aviation Regulations don't apply in Europe, you know?
> But there's a level between that concentration and zero where the ash
> causes no significant impact on the engines, at which point it's safe to fly
There probably is. But the problem is that no one knows at what level between zero and BA Flight 9 concentrations (and for how long at that concentration) it is safe to fly. The airlines don't know. Boeing and Airbus don't know. And the jet engine manufacturers don't know. The tests and certifications have simply never been done. The airlines were proposing to do said testing live and in the sky with airliners loaded with passengers. Do you see the problem with that?
The second problem is that, even if it were known that a certain concentration of volcanic ash is "safe" to fly through, it takes specialized and uncommon equipment to measure said concentrations. Said equipment is not carried aboard aircraft. And the onboard radar they do carry detects water droplets in weather formations. Volcanic ash doesn't show up at all. So an airliner flying through a "safe" concentration of ash could be five minutes away from a BA Flight 9 type cloud, and they wouldn't know until the engines shut down.
Imagine all the people...
Sorry, but you're wrong, the governments have the responsibility to ensure their citizens are safe. Keeping airlines in check and making sure they value safety above profits is their task.
Airlines can't simply be trusted to do this by themselves, even if they have the best maintenance routines and model employees [like any business] their decisions will be influenced by shareholders and upper management. Considering the difficult economic conditions for airlines I wouldn't put it past some of them.
If you're American you might have a different view on this, but as a European I trust my government over any business. We [the people] want our representatives to control this and determine when it's safe or not. We like regulations in Europe, it keeps companies in check. The banks in my country were regulated and we avoided the recession that hit the US.
The EU maintains a long list of blacklisted airlines, if the airlines don't hold adequate maintenance standards they don't get to enter European air space. There's obviously a need for some oversight.
The engine isn't the only important part of a jet aircraft. Apparently flying a jet aircraft through what's effectively 200 miles of sandblasting has other deleterious effects such as sandblasting the windshield, abrading the skin of the wing and other forward parts and trailing parts including the tail, obstructing the pitot tubes that gauge airspeed. Some of these effects are immediate and inconvenient (landing an aircraft when the windscreen is frosted glass can be challenging), and some are not immediately apparent but can cause aircraft failure several months after the ash is gone. Trailing edge surfaces can also be affected in subsonic aircraft, though these can be less important because critical control lines can not be routed aft of trailing edge surfaces. The mobility of ailerons and flaps can be affected by grit. This grit can cause failures in flight because the maintenance schedules for aircraft do not account for flying through powdered glass.
Let's review: Glass is harder than steel. Volcanic ash is glass. Volcanic ash in the air can be as course as 1.5", or as fine as 60 microns. The skin of aircraft are predominately aluminum. Aluminum is not as hard as steel. These ash particles can abrade aluminum. If you fly though enough abrasive, the skin of your aircraft will wear through.
The way airlines work some of these aircraft might be rotated to routes far from northern Europe, placing almost anyone at risk. Did that commuter plane from San Francisco to San Diego accumulate ash damage over the North Atlantic? You don't know.
It's better safe than sorry I think. We have a long history of airlines ignoring common sense and basic safety to put butts in the seats. They need regulation to keep them from getting stupid.
It's not like volcanos were just recently discovered. They predate airlines by a good bit, and Iceland volcanos go off on a regular basis. I say it's part of the normal order of the day for these airlines. If they're not insured against this risk then it's their own cost because they're self-insured. I'll bet some of them are getting compensation from their insurance and want to be compensated twice to improve their bottom line. Getting paid twice to not carry passengers is almost three times as profitable as getting passengers to grandma's house - especially if Grandma's house is in Finland, since they save some accellerated depreciation on a very expensive aircraft.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There were also all those military flights, especially the Finnish one (pics):
On 15 April, five Finnish Air Force F-18 fighter jets on exercise flew into the ash cloud in northern Finland. Volcanic dust was found on the engines of three of the aircraft and a further inspection revealed extensive damage by molten glass deposits inside the combustion chamber of one of the engines. The engines were sent for disassembly and overhaul. As a result all unnecessary military flights were cancelled except for identification flights to enforce sovereign airspace. Meanwhile a BAE Hawk trainer with special equipment to sample the volcanic dust was being flown from the 41st squadron in Kauhava. Even short test flights with an F-18 revealed engine damage sufficient to destroy engines.
and then also:
On 23 April it was announced that British Royal Air Force training flights had been suspended following volcanic ash damage to the engines of Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft.
Why should I trust commercial airlines which were losing insane money over this, over militaries of several countries?
The airspace belongs to the people. The airlines get to use the airspace with the permission of the people. The government represents the people. If you don't like it, establish a sovereign nation and treaties with international air travel authorities to do what you want as high as you like over your land.
If you think that being stuck in a safe first world country for a few days is problematic, you are far too sheltered. You took the risk to fly there for profit or pleasure, and no-one owes you a guaranteed safe passage anywhere. Notice that big blue expanse? Or those two parallel lines leading you out of Europe? If you wanted to take the initiative instead of bitching, you could have been anywhere on earth within a few days. But it's far easier to believe someone else is responsible and sit back while they fix your problem.
On the matter of 11/9, living in Britain near London I've survived the decades of pIRA attacks. We evacuated the area and returned within a few hours each time. The whole city was never closed for 3 days because we didn't have an irrational fear of potential unpredictable harm, whereas we know fairly well the action of ash in a jet engine and on cockpit glass.
They was just publicity stunts of no scientific value at all, especially given the majority of the flight time was well above the ash cloud. If they had spent hours up there flying at various speeds and altitudes and covering large swathes of Europe it might have meant something.
Of course, fortunately, the original question is easy to answer as there was no over re-action because they had to no choice. It is the law. You do not fly through volcanic ash. Maybe some research could be done on concentrations of volcanic ash that pose a threat and the law subsequently changed but as it stands, the right thing was done.
I speak as someone whose flight was cancelled.
It's my understanding that volcanic ash is, among other things, incredibly abrasive. Wouldn't flying an airliner through some airborne ash, be like a couple hours worth of sandblasting? I'd hate to think what that does to the engines.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Having said that, it's possible that the kind of eruption that causes problems for airplanes is only one possible event of several or many possible events and may be a rarity.
Having said that, overreaction is a large part of health and safety rules in most western countries, and that's a good thing.
What's not fine is that airlines would rather have people dying than lost revenue.
These conditions apparently don't show up enough to justify the cost of determining safe operating parameters. Therefore, no flying. It isn't really complicated -- if a bunch of airlines want to get together and pay for the testing, they can fly. Otherwise, they stay on the ground.
This is a knee jerk reaction to being stuck in Frankfurt longer than you wanted. If you do not know how much ash brings down a plane, do you think it's a good idea to allow planes to fly through the stuff?
The "test" flights by a few airlines added nothing to the discussion apart from the fact that it was safe, at that moment, to fly a short time through an unknown concentration of ash, over that particular country and then swan about for a couple of hours 20000 feet above the cloud. I will not fly on those airlines again. They demonstrated total disregard for their passengers by staging a stupid publicity stunt, clouding the waters of a serious technical evaluation and all for commercial gain.
Comparing the problem to the 9/11 closure is a bit silly really.
Sorry!
Because you have more engines to fail that makes it safer? The issue is all the engines failing. It doesn't really matter if you have thirty eight engines if none of them are working. The idea that you can glide to safely into Heathrow airport because your engines flamed out at 8000 feet is the kind of thinking these regulators fortunately, do not subscribe to.
We do not know the effects of the volcanic on these planes and we won't know for a long time yet.
The Y2K bug is a good analogy actually.
The technical people tell you it will all go tits up and everyone spends an enormous amount of time, money and effort making sure it doesn't happen. It then doesn't happen and everybody goes "What the hell did we spend al that money for" despite the fact that it "not happening" is exactly why they spent that money.
The airline response to the shut down of European airspace is exactly the same.
and their passengers, not the government.
whats next, prison sentences for those who don't rotate their tires?
I take it you are fine with airliners flying without seatbelts and emergency oxygen to save money? In the event of a crash passengers will be free to choose a more expensive airline when they fly again.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When the alternative is maybe falling out of the sky, yeah, a week stuck in Frankfurt is short-term. Deal with it.
"This does look like a perfect excuse for already greedy airlines to try and get more money ..."
That's ridiculous. If the government forced them to stop flying and was wrong, then the airlines should be compensated. Otherwise, let them do what they want. Who's hurt more by a plane falling out of the sky, a company or a government. They know when to ground their own.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
"...If flights had been permitted and if even one plane went down, ..."
The the same people complaining now would complain that the companies were out of their mind to fly in such conditions.
1 - At the time of the eruption, there was no other data available than from planes that had flown through dense clouds, and the results weren't very positive. From the perspective of available information, the shutdown was justified - imagine the outrage when they hadn't done that and a plane had downed.
2 - Where they did make a mistake was not immediately collecting data in whatever way possible. Adjusted planes, weather balloons - whatever. That should have allowed for adjusting the strategy as soon as possible. Instead, it took days - this is where the possible compensation story could start.
3 - I heard some budget airlines screech about having to repay passengers their hotel costs. Having been on the receiving end of the "care" such companies in general extend to passengers when they get their schedule wrong I'd say "tough luck". If you didn't insure yourself for that risk it's your own fault - those are the rules of the game. I know some find it totally acceptable to leave people alone in an airport at night (with children) without spending even a minute time to help them find local resources, so tough luck.
My best wishes to everyone who was caught out - I hope you eventually got home safely.
Insert
Sure, just as food tasters are a good way to detect things wrong with the food. Sucks to be the taster though.
"Is he still moving?"
"No."
"Mmmm, I guess this week old fish salad is bad then. Send in the next taster for the running cheese!"
"Don't you mean runny cheese".
"No."
The testing was done by airforces, you know the ones with ejection seats and two engines per passenger? And they considered it unsafe. I take their word for it. If Finland grounds its fighter defence, then I don't go up. I do not know better.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Nobody sad anything about banks not using good hardware. Most large multinational organisation have software and data thats been around for at least fifteen years.
I don't think you really understand what Y2K meant.
Even with years of effort, the place I was at on the day still had perl programs rolling the date to 00 and very nearly screwed up large financial portfolios.
This might be interesting to read,
http://www.volvoaero.com/volvoaero/global/en-gb/newsmedia/press_releases/actual/Pages/Default.aspx
Personally I believe the authorities did the right thing. By doing it in that way it was equal for all carriers.
Lufthansa executives openly declared in media they wanted to lift the ban. Imagine if a Lufthansa plane had problems with ash during a transatlantic flight. As Volvo Aero writes: "This soon causes build-ups in the turbine, which grow and inhibit the performance of the engine. In the worst case, it shuts down entirely."
Would anyone survive? Probably not. Would Lufthansa have survived such an incident? Look at Pan Am, the worlds largest carrier, until Lockerbie. They didn't last very long.....
Right. They've had 20 years since Flight 9 to do some studies and develop flight protocols for dealing with volcanic ash.
The BBC even had an interview with a guy who had invented some kind of ash monitor that could mounted at each engine in order to monitor the conditions being encountered (since the ash cloud is so hard to detect).
Unfortunately studies would cost money and the airlines had a plan: avoidance! We'll fly around any erupting volcanoes!
They figured that was a heck of a lot cheaper than some studies and additional equipment on every plane.
Now they know that avoiding Europe is just a tad more expensive than a few studies.
Perhaps they'll be done now.
What makes you think they would know?
I'd be more inclined to believe Rolls-Royce, General Electric or Pratt & Whitney.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The recession hit Europe harder than it did the U.S. GDP in the Euro area shrank by about 4% annually, while in the U.S. it only shrank a little more than 2%. Germany was actually one of the worst-hit OECD countries, faring significantly worse than the UK. They did come out of the recession quicker though. The U.S. recession in contrast was rather mild compared to all OECD countries. Where the U.S. has suffered most is in the government debt accrued during the recession.
No matter what was done there was going to be a lawsuit because billions were on the line. Billions in ticket sales or billions in funeral costs.
[signature]
I have a huge problem with the "already greedy airlines trying to get more money" little stab in the post. What is the purpose of a business? To lose money? To give money away? To be altruistic? Why is it so negative for a company to actually strive to make money? Its irritating to hear this referred to in a negative connotation. If you've ever flown anywhere, you better thank God that the owners of airlines are greedy, or those flights probably would not even exist. The owners would instead be paddling boats around the world searching for people to pass their time and money off to in the name of "not being greedy". As long as businesses are going to be looked at as evil for their "greed" we're going to have huge problems in this country.
My college (who deals with engine health monitoring and MRO's) reckons a medium sized airlines may be in the hole for US$2B should they're engines be exposed to ash.
It's much worse than that: I'm not sure that a medium-sized airline would even get a chance to spend their non-existent $2B. Let's suppose the carriers got lucky and there were no catastrophic accidents of failures from flying thru ash. There would probably be sub-catastrophic engine damage that would manifest itself over time. What's the probability of that? Nobody knows, we're talking a manly shoot-from-the-hip gamble.
What would happen if an extra 10,000+ engines from the entire European fleet prematurely came in for overhaul over the next 6-18 months? Engine overhaul capacity is a very finite thing, and so is turbine manufacturing. Overhaul facilities are already booked for scheduled maintenance well into the future. Overtime + existing parts stock definitely wouldn't cover this, and the necessary mechanics take forever to train and legally certify. Just replacing all those engines with new ones is a non-starter for many reasons.
The backlog would take years to clear. In the meanwhile, a big chunk of the entire fleet would be out of action for a long time. Could any airline survive that? Could the economy?
Branson's effectively suggesting that the entire industry should have taken a cowboy-style gamble on their entire future to save a week's losses, not to mention the broader economic and security consequences of such a disaster! Branson's never been a risk-adverse guy, but gambling the entire fleet...?!