Volcanic ash too hot for politicians
• Rob Lyons
• From: The Australian
• April 24, 2010 12:00AM
IS that it? After six days of a near shutdown of the skies over northern Europe, the British government announced British airspace would reopen at 10pm on Tuesday, local time. Now that things are getting back to something like normal, it is time to learn some lessons from the whole mad affair.
What does it say about contemporary society that it is grounded by a relatively small, distant volcano? The answer lies in a mixture of precaution, organisational cowardice and a negative attitude towards flying.
When flights were brought to a halt on April 15, it appeared that the ash would be a temporary inconvenience with flights quickly resuming. However, over the subsequent 24 hours it became clear that the cloud could hang around for days, if not weeks. We were the victims, we were told, of a peculiar combination of volcanic activity and weather patterns. Flying, we were assured, was simply too risky.
The proof was to be found in the startling experiences of a British Airways flight over Indonesia in 1982 and a KLM flight over Alaska in 1989. On both occasions, aeroplanes flew through clouds of volcanic ash; all four engines on each aeroplane stopped working and the pilots were forced to descend thousands of feet before being able to restart the engines.
For those involved, the experiences must have been terrifying. But there seems to have been too little effort to understand how the situation over the past few days may have been very different from those earlier incidents. For example, the KLM flight was a mere 240km from the volcano in question, Mount Redoubt, while London's Heathrow airport is 1900km from the volcano in Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier. While neither the British Airways nor the KLM crew knew immediately what was going on, the cabin filled with the smell of sulphur and what appeared to be cigarette smoke. When the British Airways plane landed, the windscreen of the aircraft was so sandblasted that the pilots could not see out well enough to taxi the plane and it had to be towed off the runway. KLM, Lufthansa, Air France and British Airways reported nothing like that during test flights last weekend.
This would suggest that the concentrations of ash particles in those earlier incidents were far higher than have been found over Europe in recent days. Yet even in those two most notable examples, the engines of the planes all restarted at lower altitudes and the planes landed safely, even if it was touch and go for a while. So, in 2010, hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost to the travel industry, hundreds of thousands of people have been stranded and imports of perishable goods have been badly affected - all to avoid a scenario that has never cost a single life. As one writer noted, if we took a similar approach to driving, our motorways would be full of cars pootling along at 50km/h.
Yet many commentators have ridiculed airlines for questioning the restrictions. Gathering the available evidence is certainly sensible, but the expert worship in this instance is misplaced. Someone whose expertise is meteorology or vulcanology may well be able to measure particle concentrations in the atmosphere and make some educated guesses about how those concentrations might change. But it is highly unlikely that the same expert can tell us anything definitive about whether those concentrations will damage a jet engine. Is it really mad to suggest that the airlines, whose reputations after all would be on the line if they got it wrong, might have some useful insights into whether flying is safe or not? Other commentators have offered what they seem to think is an inspired argument: if critics of this safety-first approach are so certain, they should take part in a test flight. The fact that airline bosses like BA's Willie Walsh and KLM's Peter Hartman did that last weekend seems to have passed such insightful wits by.
We also need to be aware that experts don't necessarily have a brilliant track record on estimating risk in the face of uncertainty. For example, in the 1990s there were claims that hundreds of thousands of people could die from the human form of mad cow disease (BSE). In truth, there have been 168 deaths from variant Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), but 1139 deaths from the long-standing form of the disease in the same period (such a tiny rate of incidence that some have called the BSE-CJD link into question). As Frank Furedi notes, from the Millennium Bug to influenza, experts have provided apocalyptic scenarios of what might happen and governments have been very willing to act upon them.
This is symptomatic of a contemporary problem with political leadership. In recent years, responsibility for making decisions has been increasingly farmed out to independent experts. These decisions are designed to make sure politicians can't be held responsible if things go wrong. "It wasn't us, guv, it was the experts wot did it. We were just following advice." Which does rather raise the question of why we elect leaders in the first place. Such reliance on experts is not helpful. Just as the vulcanologist cannot tell us much, if anything, about jet engines, so it is not the place of experts, no matter how eminent, to make policy. Scientists, engineers and aviation officials can all bring their knowledge to the table but it is elected officials who must decide how to balance the risks and the benefits of a situation like flying through an ash cloud. The promotion of experts allows our supposed leaders off the hook. So British Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis could say yesterday: "It's fair to say that we have been too cautious."
"We" being the international safety regulators. The only thing that might drown out the noise of jet engines in the next few days is the sound of the buck being passed. Unfortunately for all those affected, the politicians have gone missing. Oliticians fail to take decisions on an important matter, and blame others for not giving them the right information. It is over-caution combined with cowardice dressed up as outsourcing.
For six days there was political paralysis in the face of this natural event. The notion of "no safe threshold" for atmospheric ash particles was clung to even when test flights conducted by the airlines suggested it was not true. And there appeared to be positive rejoicing at the absence of planes from our skies. Far from there being desperation to get transport working normally, to release people stuck in departure lounges or stuck thousands of kilometres from home, flying was treated as an optional extra, something that society could happily do without.
It was not a volcano that brought sections of society to a standstill: it was political disorientation, the application of the precautionary principle, and a cavalier attitude among the elite towards the value of flying in the first place.
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