It is amazing how easy it is to bring aviation to its knees. An errant volcano on Iceland, winds blowing in the wrong direction and air transportation in Europe and beyond comes to a grinding halt as country after country closes their airspace to protect the traveling public. Volcanic ash is very bad news for aircraft engines and instruments… We are now into the third day of the almost total ban on flying with the skies over Europe empty and airports eerily silent. This is like a bad horror movie. Or is it?
Of course one may argue about the wisdom or indeed the need for such a total ban on flying on account of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. Test flights by KLM and Lufthansa conducted to check the theory have not shown any damage to the engines (when I first heard about these test flights, I was really surprised… who would risk a multimillion dollar set of engines to test such a theory… but then with their fleet all but grounded, the price of a few engines would be small change compared to the loss they were already making).
Whether the ban was justified or not, there is an important message here for the industry and the aviation business and it ties in with an article I have written recently, discussing how we are preparing, or rather, failing to prepare, for possibly catastrophic changes in the atmosphere. My focus was changes that may come about as a result of global warming and the current situation is the result of an old-style volcano, but the end result is the same: by assuming that the atmosphere in which we fly remains essential the same and a known quantity we ignore the need to prepare for the times when this assumption is no longer true.
And that time is to-day.
The amount of money spent by the world to satisfy written and unwritten environmental protection requirements is huge and we all know that some of those requirements and the most accepted solutions are mostly moonshine. Like hybrid cars and wind-turbines. Everyone is worried about the potential disruptive effects of climate change and most of the money goes into projects that may have a positive impact 20-30 years down the road… if we are lucky.
The amount of money lost in the world economy as the result of this single miserly volcano eruption is way above the typical loss from a particularly nasty storm or the attendant flooding.
Why are we not spending a dime on managing the effects of global warming that are already with us to-day? That there were no models for this type of volcanic eruption and no plans for dealing with it is perhaps not surprising (although Icelandic volcanoes did send sulfuric acid rain to Europe a few hundred years ago) but is there anyone out there trying to figure out what aviation should do if prevalent winds change and most runways turn out to be pointing in the wrong direction or forces in the atmosphere suddenly turn out to be much stronger than aircraft are being designed for? I do not think anyone is looking into this anywhere.
The aviation industry should use the opportunity of this ash cloud and explain to governments and environmentalist that while saving the world from eco-disaster is the right thing to do, an equal or even bigger amount of effort and funds are needed to develop ways of dealing with the negative effects of climate change we can no longer avoid.
Grounding all aircraft each time a disaster hits is an option only in the beginning. If no better plan is developed, there will be nobody left to ground.
We have a volcano to blame this time and claiming that this was an unforeseeable event even has some credibility. However, if we do not prepare for the foreseeable, we will only have ourselves to blame.
Do you really think that such volcanic eruption is due to global warming? Volcanic eruption is a long time phenomenon, although not affecting our Western countries in such a way.
It must be observed that there is a lack of knowledge concerning ash density influence on engine performances according to engine types. Is it however justified to completely close airspace, also in low level and for general aviation traffic?
We urgently need more information on ash density effects on the different types of engines, not blocking all traffic with its effects on economy, because insurance uncertainty coverage due to lack of investigations on this phenomenon.
Gradual contingency plans are required managing such a situation and fine tuning the required measures, instead of being frozen by a lack of understanding of effects.
No, not at all. The point I am trying to make is that this volcanic incidence has highlighted the fragility of the industry and its exposure to catastrophic natural events (some of which might be caused by global warming)with nobody having a plan as to what should be done.
Some natural catastrophies can be foreseen and appropriate measures or preparations taken to mitigate their effects. But right now the priority is always about saving the environment (a noble objective) while the need to have something ready for the problems of to-day is ignored and certainly no real funds are being allocated for that kind of work.
Ok, Steve, I agree with you in that context.
We can suppose that the problem will be more taken into account while affecting now our Western countries.
By the way, I had a totally unscientific theory about why there are so many earthquakes and other seisimic phenomena… If the crust of the Earth is indeed warming up as a result of general warming everywhere, would it not expand slightly and this could be sufficient to kick the tectoic plates?
May be this is total nonesense but is there a real theiry for all this seismic activity all over the globe?
Steve,
So many questions here, but let’s just get back to the current little local difficulty, the pending annihilation of the European Air Transport Industry. I speak with more than usual personal interest, I am currently stuck in Montreal awaiting resumption of flights to Europe..
Two obvious questions: how can we make rational decisions on the ash cloud, and who should make them?
To take the second first, I hope no one in the ATC world will take this amiss, but my jaw dropped when I saw the initial airspace closure announcement coming from NATS; what the **** do they know about airworthiness? Where were EASA/CAA/DGAC etc? I must have been under a misapprehension all these years, I thought the ANSPs’ job was to prevent aluminium to aluminium contact, and to leave the flying to the operators.
That doesn’t mean the decision was wrong, I don’t suppose there was much else that could be done initially, but what of the continued closure? We are bombarded with reminders of how flying through a dense ash cloud will spoil your entire day (but provide a life time after dinner speaking career), but there are a lot of people out there wondering how that experience relates to encounters with the invisible variety. But there is no data, I hear you cry. But there is, not repeatable perhaps but it is there to be found. Take the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. The report http://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/casa/index.html shows 18 ash encounters up to 1740 km from the eruption with two losses of thrust and the removal of 10 engines due to damage. Not cheap, but the Pinatubo eruption covered a huge area for a long time and this number represents only a tiny fraction of the aircraft that must have flown through the ‘cloud’ as defined today. I don’t know whether one can recreate the cloud location and flight tracks after so long, but it would be worth a try; a lot of the data would seem to be in the public domain. From this an other similar events one could surely deduce go/no go boundaries. And it goes without saying that the decision ought to be the operators’.
Alex,
Hope your flight home will be on its way soon and will bring you back safely.
I agree with everything you are saying. My point in fact was and is: there are many phenomena out there that are possibly new (unlike the volcano for which the world could have preperad) and everyone seems to be spending effort and money onmaking the planet greener while in the meantime, the nasty things that are already here are left unattended and shoukd a similar even occur due to something different, the world would be equally unprepared and the decisions would be just as unprepared. I keep saying this because the current mind-set is that the environment needs to be preotected from the villians (true) but nobody seems to work on how to protect our industry (and others) from the bloody environment that might very well turn out to be a good deal more hostile in the future than it used to be.
No flying in Belgium at least until 8p today…
Steve,
I wasn’t deliberately ignoring your point , I just thought it was an appropriate opportunity to raise the #1 issue affecting Europe today. Your concerns do need to be addressed directly.
specifically on changes due to warming, I wouldn’t worry too much about runway directions no longer being optimal, but I would be worried about increased winds and turbulence. When we accepted the closure of Heathrow’s crosswind runway, 23, I looked at the record at Gatwick whose single runway has pretty much the same orientation as Heathrow’s remaining parallels. Yes there were some diversion due to wind, but on inspection they turned out to be more down to turbulence rather than excedence of X-wind limits per se (we now take up to 40 kt in gusts). This is the challenge to the engineers, improve the gust response of the aircraft so that the average guy can cope with increased turbulence. It shouldn’t be impossible, believe it or not when you sit up front you can actually hear the gust before you feel it….
The biggest worry, though, as exemplified by the current ash crisis, is that if you raise an issue, the official response isn’t ‘let’s fix it’ it’s ‘ban it’!