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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?"
Basically, the jet's internals are hot enough to melt rock back into glass... So after a couple of passes through ash clouds, you have a thin layer of glass covering all the internal turbine blades. Which completely destroys the engine, and is extremely hard to repair without completely replacing the blades.
So, basically, what I've been told is that, yes, flying a jet through a volcanic ash cloud is a good recipe for completely destroying the engines, such that they need to be rebuilt, within two or three passes through the ash. It sounds plausible, and I've not yet heard anyone who actually does aircraft maintenance or anything like that suggest that it's harmless.
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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.
The summary is wrong. It is the founder of Virgin Atlantic that wants compensation, not the government. Has anyone ever heard of a government wanting to dish out compensation?
Better known as 318230.
Don't know if you put any stock in what an aircraft manufacturer might say on the subject, but...
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_09/volcanic_story.html
Summary: If you find yourself flying into an ash cloud, turn around immediately.
So, yeah, maybe Branson wants a check, but flying into ash clouds is a very bad idea. And they don't show up on weather radar.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/why-cant-planes-fly-through-volcanic-ash-because-nasa-tried-once It basically starts to eat the plane's internals. So, while it may or may not experience problems immediately, it almost certainly will in the longer run, grounding those planes while they have parts replaced, and costing a fortune in new parts, because most of the shown damage in the pictures is not safely fixable.
Finland's air force flew into the ash cloud, and released some photos of the damage. It ain't pretty.
My vote's on cash grab.
I know almost all regulations are written in blood. If the wind decides to shift and a plane goes down that's unacceptable.
Richard Branson should fly through an ash cloud and let us know.
I was in Fairbanks at the time, and many people I know where stranded, trying to get home for Christmas vacation.
That's "were," you fucking moron.
Jesus, I hate people who can't spell.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I don't know how many flights were grounded, but I worked on some planes that passed through the cloud. When popping some panels to change the reading lights, I would find small piles of ash (more like gray sand) up inside. Nobody seemed too concerned about it. They probably figured they would clean it up during the next "C" inspection(they tear out the entire interior). And the engines would probably remain until somebody complains about reduced power or high turbine temps or fuel consumption. Now, if you want to really wreck an airplane, fly it through some hail. And be ready for a tremendous noise.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
As ably demonstrated by "Bang Goes the Theory" on the BBC (UK-only video, unfortunately, but the content is up on Youtube (for now) here), at Jet-engine internal temperatures the volcanic ash melts into glass, that then sticks to both the turbine blades and the casing, and can cause imbalance and catastrophic failure, but there is a fix! If you turn off the engines and glide the plane through cold air and allowing the turbine blades to cool down, the metal contracts, which is enough variance to shatter the brittle glass and expel it from the engine. However, of course, this involves turning off the engines for an extended period, finding a patch of cold air to glide through, and hoping the glass shatters and is expelled, and that you can get the engines fired back up again, before you get what is referred to in the business as an "Uncontrolled descent into terrain".
Erik Klemetti's Eruptions blog has a recent post called Eyjafjallajökull flight cancellations: How the right decision is being made to look wrong defending the decision to cancel, with much discussion in the comments section. (IMO, that blog's recent series of posts on the Iceland situation has been the best place to read about the eruption.)
Hey moderators--look a little more closely and you'll notice that the so-called flamer and the person he flamed were the same people!
This ain't rocket surgery.
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 !
That's a really telling translation. It appears as if the Google translator is trying to decipher the sentence in a way that assumes Finnish word suffixes are directly mapped to English prepositions. It saw the "sta" at the end of "perunajauhomaista" and assumed it means "from", and properly translated "perunajauho" as potato flour... Of course, the word is a form of "perunajauhomainen" which is an adjective that basically means "resembling potato flour" that was being used to describe the volcanic "ash dust".
Shutting down most of Europe's airspace was entirely the right decision. All it would take is one flight through an unexpected dust cloud to produce a near-disaster, if not a crash. That's happened at least five times in the past. Read Boeing's advisory on volcanic ash.
Read Branson's autobiography? Several times in his life, he's been involved in adventure vacations that left someone else dead. This is not someone you want making risk management decisions for others.
The big problem now is that the airlines are botching the logistics of getting people back where they're supposed to be. There are people being told they can't get a flight until mid-May, because they booked a flight using frequent-flyer miles or via some discount deal that has a low priority. They can't get the airline on the phone, and they get hit with heavy roaming charges while on hold. This is really tough on people in transit running out of money.
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 cooling system used in gas turbines (jet engines) is very sophisticated and necessary to keep the superalloy blades from creeping too fast. The system consists of bypass air channeled through the blades and exhausted through tiny perforations, creating a layer of cooler air between the blade and the hot flow from the combustor. Furthermore there are two ceramic layers on the outside of the blade. One to prevent oxidation. One to slow heat transfer (insulate). As has been mentioned in other articles, the cooling pores could get clogged by the ash. I also suspect the coating might fail if impacted by ash. If the coating fails or otherwise reacts with the ash, then you can definitely have a problem.
If the blades get just a few tens of degrees hotter, they will surely fail. There's not a lot of margin for error with jet engines. Through good design and manufacturing control, we've managed to make gas turbines extremely reliable, but ash is not a design condition at all. It's abrasive, might react with the coating, and might accumulate on the blades, changing both their mass and aerodynamics.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
That's the problem, I'm not from a major European country. I'm Norwegian. Norway took the correct measures to stave off any negative effects (according to the OECD). Jobs, banks and housing markets remained stable. We have 2.6% unemployment.
While there might be more to the story than simply having regulated our banking industry we did very well during this recession. It doesn't hurt that we're the world's 3rd largest exporter of oil, or that we have no national debt, and put our oil revenue in a huge sovereign fund invested abroad. We base our welfare state on taxes, not on oil revenue.
Part of the reason our banks were already regulated was the fact that during the 1980s Norway had its own bank crisis and housing market crash. The government had to take control of the collapsed banks and rebuild them. Since then our banks have been strictly regulated and the housing market stable.
The UK was badly hit by the recession obviously, but Germany has been out of recession for a long time now. Germany is the major nation in Europe. I believe France technically came out of recession too. Spain, Portugal and Greece are not large countries. I doubt you can find a European country that experienced the recession on the scale of the US.
I can provide a source too if you like: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009217763_norway14.html