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:

False Alarm. Iceland Met Says No Imminent Threat of Eruption
 

20/20 hindsight from Learmont

Didn't I read somewhere, once upon a time, that there are
constant volcanic eruptions occuring all round the World?
Minor ones, admittedly, but most pumping loads of crap into
the atmosphere.

Interesting article from the BBC on how 'officials got it wrong on volcanic ash'.

BBC News - Officials 'wrong' on volcanic ash

I believe this was covered a week ago in the Tech section.

I'm not sure I agree with that article. A quick scan read gives the impression that the earth scientists were actively telling the UK govt/CAA about the threat of volcanos. I can't remember any such thing. I think the problem is more that one group of scientists doesn't talk to another group. Earth scientists don't really talk to aerospace scientists, and neither group talks to the government.

Also, a quick literature search doesn't show up much evidence that Vulcanologists were warning of an imminent eruption, the only papers I can find related to iceland are saying the opposite.

(edit) Rubbish spelling.

Simon,

I am surmising that your statement:

is concluded from this statement in the article:

As you will note from the article, Mr. Miller is Labour MP Andrew Miller, who's party was in administration during the farce. It can also be drawn from the quote above from Mr. Miller that he is attempting to direct responsibility to the CAA and away from the government failings.

However, this quote is rather telling :

The farce has been subject to thread discussions at length and there is not much point in rehashing the whole lot again and run around in circles. If you want to push an agenda then fine, thats up to you, but expect to be called on it.

This latest news report is some completely self-seeking publicity by "scientists" for their own works. Possibly at a time when government financial support for various projects, scientific and otherwise, is being reduced, we should expect more such.

If the scientists were saying that the huge no-fly area was completely inaccurately calculated, and scientists should have identified what was done was a nonsense, fair enough. But they don't. This is about them playing a part in predicting volcanic eruptions in the first place and how likely this is. They are saying that they would have predicted the Iceland volcano as more likely than was believed.

What would be even more useful would be if they had predicted by scientific means that after 999 volcano eruptions in recent years which were handled fine, the 1,000th would result in ludicrous behaviour by civil servants who do not know one end of a volcano fromn the other.

Clever presentation of the press release allows a perception to be made to many that they are saying that if we had paid more attention to scientists, there wouldn't have been the disruption. It comes over like this in this morning's TV summaries which show a backdrop of thousands sat in departure lounges, the implication being that we would not have been sat there, delayed, if scientists had been listened to. Reading the report fully (which few will do) shows they don't say any such thing.

WHBM,

You're on the money there. One should always scratch beneath the surface for the reality, not take PR at face value. This situation is no different.

with income sources being limited, the 'scientific' community needs new sources of income?

If you are referring to this quote,

then he most certainly is not.

This "latest news report" concerns the witness of the government's chief scientist before a Parliamentary Committee, which is currently holding hearings.

PBL

Good couple of reports here from the Royal Aeronuatical Society on Ash Cloud lessons and implications for the aerospace sector...

Under the ash cloud | Aerospace Insight | The Royal Aeronautical Society

and a more in-depth free specialist paper to d/l too...

http://www.aerosociety.com/cms/uploa...lcanic_Ash.pdf

That is exactly what I am referring to. Evidence to parliamentary committees is as thought-through by PR teams as anything that ends up in the media, and commonly press-released in parallel (with useful soundbite paragraphs at the bottom for news editors) the second after it has been said.

What are you on about? I posted because someone else put the article up and it's a subject I'm interested in from a scientific perspective. I'm not British and don't live in the UK, so the politics behind it are of no interest to me.
Of course, you're more than welcome to disagree with my comments, but disagreeing with them on a political basis that I'm not even aware of is a bit much ;)

"Europe was right to halt flights after volcano" - New Scientist
 

New Scientist reports on the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences:
...

This press release is already running in the Tech section

The question is why airline executives have not been sued or even prosecuted for failing they duty to shareholders and having Business Impact Analysis (which they are supposed to act upon) and Business Continuity Plan for this event?

It is a legal requirement, after all, to do this and they were fully aware of the potential impact.

Why is it that my car is getting more crap on it now than when we were all scare mongered about the volcanic ash earlier?

Will we be having no fly zones to prevent a build up of pollen, and in turn honey, in jet engines clogging them up?

Tests on ash show volcano flight ban was right - Herald Scotland | News | Home News

"Some critics questioned whether it was justified, but now the new scientific report published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes it was.

Researchers analysed samples of ash from the volcano and found they were capable of causing an air disaster.
The fragments remained sharp and abrasive even after attempts to blunt the particles by stirring them in water.
They would have sandblasted aircraft windows, making them impossible to see through, and could have stalled engines.
The report is at odds with claims made by airlines after European airspace was closed last year.
Some operators said that safety measures imposed by the semi-privatised air traffic control organisation, Nats, were an over-reaction."

The researchers, led by Dr Sigurdur Gislason from the University of Iceland, wrote: “The very sharp, hard particles put aircraft at risk from abrasion on windows and body and from melting in jet engines. In the lab, ash particles did not become less sharp during two weeks of stirring in water, so airborne particles would remain sharp even after days of interaction with each other and water in clouds. Thus, concerns for air transport were well-grounded.”

The issue was never whether ash can cause damage to aircraft and engines, of course it can, the experiences of BA in Indonesia and KLM in Alaska are well enough documented.

The issue was with the critical density within the cloud and at its margins, how it was moving and how it was dissipating; I haven't read the report, but does it really make a convincing case that a sufficiently high risk necessitated the closure of airspace as far as the Adriatic coast within the first couple of days of the event? If so, how was it that this risk had suddenly disappeared by day 4, when almost all the affected airspace was reopened, leaving the 'danger area' where it had been all the time, a relatively limited region, at a relatively limited altitude, over the sea between Iceland, Scotland and Norway.