really what should they have done??? Firstly talked to airlines who are used to dealing with ash in active volcano areas and use their operational advice.

Second use satellite real time visible ash plume monitoring. Stick a safety margin around those and make those dense ash areas NO GO.

Fly in daylight and if possible avoid flying in clouds especially pollution coloured clouds.

The mathematical computer generated low ash areas should have no ash limits at all ( better than choosing a number between one and ten) ;) but should have been purely precautionary areas. I say that because even with millions of tests you have no way of telling whether half a mile from the test spot you dont have denser areas.

Operate in those predicted low ash areas and be prepared for more inspections to monitor longer term ash damage if any.

Lastly eliminate all the expensive quangos and committees involved in the descision making process on the basis that committees can never agree about anything (No one ever built a statue to a committee :ugh: and have one body to make descisions

Thats it NO more NO less

Pace

No and yes :)

Agree about the decsion making part of it not being dependant on committees and the need for a specific process tuned to daily info to make such decisions.

The committees are useful to evaluate the considerations that should be accounted for in the decision process. Hence in the regulatory sense we have codified rules and we have avisory material

Katla is looking kinda busy, three quakes in the past four hours. Just thought y'all like to know.

I hope the British Government is chartering some cattle boats to get the football hooligans (and that's just the players) back from RSA next week if it does kick off

Yesterday's total was three quakes under Eyja-jokull and five under Myrda-jokull/Katla. We need to get those Strats, Connies and DC-3s back into production. Low level flying with piston engine power is the way to go.

The data from the earthquake monitors is pretty useless if we don't know how to analyse it. The tremor levels are very low, especially those closest to the Katla volcano. If you go and look at earthquake maps of other places in Iceland you'll see that minor quakes happen there all the time. Actually, the volcanic eruption probably obscured a lot of these quakes in the background tremor. What's more, these recent earthquakes around Katla have high error factors on them and are at very shallow depth. The Icelandics don't seem too concerned!

Yes, these quakes are very small as compared with those occurring around the Pacific Rim on a daily basis but Katla tends to blow without warning, these small tremors are the only indicator we have. What worries me is that the quakes are so near the surface, indicative of something imminent.

I look forward to hearing Wright Turbo-Cyclones and Bristol Centaurus engines droning overhead.

Along with the smell of hot castor oil. :ok:

G-G ,go to a Classic race day,it`s the smell of Castrol R you want.....

Another explanation of some of the difficulties of predicting ash clouds.

Elegant Figures : Blogs

Beautiful imagery - but still fails to address the key problem: timeliness. I assume at least some of the satellites in use were in polar orbits, so there's a variable delay before the patch of atmosphere you want gets imaged. Geostationary sats are (maybe...) too far out to deliver the detail needed and anyway don't carry the relevant sensors. (I may be entirely wrong on this.)

Icelandic conference
 

Apparently there is a conference in Keflavik next week with an assembly of assorted experts to consider the lessons of the great volcanic ash drama - and presumably to suggest future measures. Anybody going - or have any idea which way the wind might blow (sorry!) there?

SB

Well I suppose we might get to know about the huge pile of damaged jet engines resulting from the decision to fly through non-zero levels of ash, reports of which remain absent from this site...

Or maybe not.

Would these be the same assorted experts who did such a ridiculous job of handling the situation in the first place ?

Have they invited anybody with a view other than their own one ?

Geosats are very capable of delivering ash cloud information...but the problem for places like iceland is that the spatial resolution is quite poor (due to the angle between iceland and the equator):
EUMETSAT IPPS animation - Meteosat 0 degree Ash Iceland

Our geo satellites contain all the sensors needed for ash analysis. Although, as always, additional sensors would be an improvement (which will arrive in 2015).

On the plus side, because iceland is near the poles we gain a lot of high resolution polar data at high frequency - we can gain 5-6 images of iceland per day from polar sensors.

(edit) Oh, just noticed that the post was a month old. Apologies.

Before getting the Connies out in the air(*) I have been told that a US airline is suing an hollywood production firm for over a billion US$ for loss of revenue because this firm had placed high explosive charges near Eyjafjallajokull to start an eruption for film footage (for a mega production to come) a few days before the full eruption.
Could not find any confirmation of this on the web. Anyone heard something or is it just a wild story ?

(*) restauring a Connie to full flying status is extremely expensive and a very lenghty process as the Lufthansa staff in Berlin can tell you :They try since 2 years to get one in the air from 2 "good" airframes,but they are still years away .

Really? I doubt it though, if it did it would have to be a hell of a lot of 1.1 high explosives buried deep within the volcano a rather expensive do, surface explosions the gases are released upwards, with very little effect downwards.

European volcanic upset could have been avoided
 

SIA cancels Jakarta flights
 

Well Merapi has only be chuffing away for 12 days and QF has had two engines fail on climb out of Singapore so I guess a little respect for mother nature is probably overdue.
If ash forms a hard glaze on the hotsurfaces then I suppose the risk of blades being heavier than designed might stress an engine if the glaze is not dealt with.

Airlines stop Jakarta flights after volcano blast - Yahoo! News

here we go again....flights cancellations. :uhoh: