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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.
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.
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 !
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"...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.