Originally Posted by
Postman Plod
But thats fine - their only job is to maximise profits and profile of their respective companies. As long as they are held to the rules and regulations by the regulators and manufacturers, and called on their BS in the case of MOL, then there won't be a problem!
Er, only part right... Ensuring that their respective airlines don't have a high profile safety incident/accident, which sends passengers scurrying to another airline is also a very big part of their jobs.
Never thought I'd write in defence of MOL but he is quite right (no matter what I or anyone else think of his personal style). And WW is a qualified pilot who is trying very hard to apply aircrew common sense, in the face of outrageous bureaucracy.
I've followed this whole farce quite closely and yet yesterday was the first I'd heard of airlines not submitting safety cases for high/red areas. Given that "high" is anything over 4 mg per m3, are they supposed to have made a safety case for anything from 4mg per m3 up to 4 tonnes per m3 (exaggeration for effect BTW)??? The "high" area was dreamt up by the regulators to get people flying again last year. That they have sat on their hands, and not made efforts to raise this threshold since, is causing further problems and making some people cry "unsafe" without any justification. The lack of safety cases is a red herring to deflect attention from the regulators IMO.
Now, instead of a very coarse contour plot, labelled with emotive terms like "low", "medium" and "high", why not produce a fine grained plot with many different numerical values and then allow airlines to generate a safety case relating to the level that they are prepared to accept (if any of this is really necessary vice "see/sense and avoid", in any case)?
Incidentally, the direct route from Kuala Lumpur to Perth is 130 nm from the volcano that caused Eric Moody his problems, at the closest point. I don't have figures for the other couple of known incidents but seriously doubt that they are much different. Hardly damning evidence for closing airspace 650 nm (and in some cases far further) from Iceland... If that sort of range really was in a dangerous zone (regardless of "exceptional weather conditions") we'd have seen far more incidents over the years (as all the sensible correspondents have already pointed out).
As for pilots who aren't worried about losing a bit of money by staying on the ground for a while - perhaps they think more about what will happen to us all when the whole economy collapses as a result of this nonsense.