Originally Posted by
Agaricus bisporus
Congrats on your worthless gift of 20/20 hindsight.
If we'd had the
foresight to ask folks in areas where volcanoes are common, we'd have found different rules to what was applied in europe. Or maybe everywhere else is just unsafe and we know best, based on our once in a couple of centuries experience of VA...
Would you have betted the lives of tens of thousands of fare paying passengers,
You bet them anyway, by closing the airspace. Even aside the risk to folks stuck for a month without medication etc., many many thousands of others were diverted to road transport. At 30 times the fatality risk ppm. [and that is just road travel - before we even get into looking at ferries or people crossing the Channel in RIBs].
Media estimates were 1M pax stranded from the UK alone. If only 10% of those were repatriated by road then you have, statistically, caused multiple fatalities.
Unless you have the science to
prove flight was >30 times more dangerous than normal.
That science apparently wasn't available - so a decision was taken without it, to subject hundreds of thousands of pax to a
known substantially
increased risk of accident, through less safe modes of transport, in favour of avoiding an
unknown level of increased risk in the air, from a problem that has
never caused an aircraft crash.
Even if the ash made flight ten times more risky than normal, that was
still the wrong decision.
as well as the financial health of six dozen airlines
The airlines should have been allowed to do their own tests and risk assessments for their financial health. That's their job.
Shutdown cost esitmates
for the airlines alone are around 100 times the repair cost of the NASA aircraft damage quoted above,
per day. Did we see 100+ aircraft go tech each day for major engine repairs after flight was allowed through the ash ? Nope. Wrong decision on that basis as well.
Had we let the airlines take the financial risk decision, any cost (fly or no fly) would have been down to them. Instead, the (wrong) decision was forced on them, and they (rightly) want compensation as a result - which will be from us, the taxpayers, not from those in charge who will probably get a pay rise because the job of regulating aviation is so much harder than they thought before...
Acceptable concentrations of ash (according to Flight International) are 10exp-17g/cuM.
Not any more. 2000 ug/cuM is the safety limit, below 200 is no risk, 200-2000 is (paraphrased) fly on your own risk assessment. Allegedly, those limits are based on science, and themselves have a safety margin of several times below what the mfrs. have found to be dangerous.
So the new and (your quoted) old safety limits are a factor of about 10E14 different.
Now, to me at least, those figures are
way too far apart to have
both been arrived at without, as you say, "wild assumption before you had any scientific info upon which to base your decision".
So, which do you think is the "wild assumption" number and which is the one with scientific evidence... ?