Volcanos and Europe
It’s been several days of largely no air traffic across northern Europe and the natives are getting restless. Airline CEOs (Willie Walsh) are going on “test flights”, mammoth airlines (KLM) are sending up their cargo aircraft and the UK government is now sending naval ships to get Britons home.
Is it reasonable to have this ban? I really don’t know. I somehow think that there was an overabundance of caution deployed at the beginning and I do think that no country wants to be the one to blink on safety right now either. The log jam is not so much the ash in the air at this point as it is politics I suspect. You have all of western Europe wondering if they should or should not allow flights and everyone knows that if they do and an aircraft runs into trouble, all fingers will point at them.
The disappointing thing about this is that no science has been conducted (to the best of my research) to make a determination if things such as a flight ban are really warranted. No one is doing real atmospheric testing and tracking to make a rational decision on what might be the right thing to do. From what I can tell, no one even seems to be contemplating such a reasonable act and that’s disappointing for the consumers stranded across Europe.
Europe isn’t one country but we have a tendency to think of it as one country. It’s lots of countries each with its own political leadership, aviation agencies and airlines. I don’t think this is going to get sorted out for another 48 hours or more and even then we’re talking about 40% to 50% of the flights getting back on track to start with. This could take another 4 to 8 days afterwards to bring operations back on line completely. All of this is, of course, contingent on that Icelandic Sparkler not erupting with more fury too.
Don’t blame the volcano. Don’t blame the airlines. Blame the political leadership this time.
One friend called me this morning asking for guidance on him getting to Frankfurt leaving from DFW on Saturday. I certainly think his flight has a shot as of today. I think if we haven’t seen flights start to resume by Wednesday morning, it’s time for a backup plan. His backup is to fly to Madrid, catch a connection to Milan and then take a train to Frankfurt. Doable but that’s a long few days of traveling and no assurance of getting out when his business conference is over.
Does anyone remember Mt. St. Helens bringing a flight down?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
-R
(just curious…)
A lot less was known then too. Remember that the infamous British Airways incident near Indonesia happened after Mt. St. Helens. So did the KLM / Alaska incident. Also, the ash plume from St. Helens’ eruptions went east by northeast and most of it trailed off into Canada and the Arctic. At the time of St. Helens’ eruprtions, I was flying once or twice a month to Portland via Braniff’s DFW-SEA-PDX flights. That flight never got cancelled (indeed, it once erupted on the segment between SEA and PDX while I was on the flight), some SEA/PDX straight eastbound flights did get cancelled. Generally, it was easy then to by-pass the problem by simply flying west over the Pacific, south below St. Helens and then continuing on eastbound to most any destination.
It is also worth remembering that the two incidents everyone is using as an example for safety happened close to the volcanos (within about 60 to 80 miles) and the location of the ash plume(s) were relatively unknown because of their location in the world.
Do I think Europe overreacted? To some degree, yes. Do I think the airlines threw a temper tantrum? Yes, I do. We need more data on what is and is not safe.