UK Airspace Closed - Volcanic Ash Disaster

UK Airspace Closed - Volcanic Ash Disaster.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8621407.stm

Bizzare story, apparently the UK is now covered in the fall out of Icelandic volcanic Ash and this has caused the complete closure of the UK airspace with no International and Domestic Flight allowed. Looking out of the window at the clear blue skies right now. Yet the satellite photographic evidence suggests otherwise confirming no ash cloud even over eastern Scotland.

http://www.amfearliathmor.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ch38.jpg

I can't help but laugh. I am truly sorry for those that are inconvenced by the Ash. But the irony of sudenly having almost all of Eruope being shut down by this ash ploom makes me laugh.

Man as a whole has a tendancey to think that it is all powerful, that we can handle anything and that our daily lives and travel will not be interupted by weather, or enviorment. I remember once a guy got stuck on an island in Maine and couldn't get out for 5 days. His employer was shocked and upset at the thought that the man counldn't just fly out or drive out. Alas there were no roads, no planes and the rivers were too high and dangerous for guides boat.

Often we travel thinking that our travels will be no more than a few hours delay, but this cloud reminds us all that, "Mother Nature is Queen"

I dont think that the UK is covered in ash !
Central London certainly is not ! the weather is sunny with light cloud or haze at high level, this might be the ash cloud or it might be natural.

No non-emergency air flights are allowed due to the risks of engine failure caused by volcanic ash/dust.
Helicopters can still fly, at relatively low level, one was used earlier today for a medical emergency.
I would expect that small fixed wing airplanes could still fly at low level, though this is prohibited.

Most unforunate for those wishing to fly, but I doubt that we will see much effect on life otherwise.
I saw hundreds of potential passengers queing at the Eurostar terminal a few hours ago.

If this carries on for long, I can forsee shortages of luxury or out of season foodstuffs as these are flown in.
I would not expect any effect on supplies of basic foods as these are either produced in the UK or imported by sea.


Although not truly an emergency, this situation must be extremly inconvienient for those wishing to fly and being held up for a day or or two.
Shows the importance of being prepared not just for major disasters, but for this sort of thing.
I wonder how many of those delayed are equiped with a change of clothes, ready cash, and a credit card , and phone numbers of friends and relatives, and coins for payphones.
I could not obtain cellphone service earlier today near St. Pancras, it normally works fine, and I suspect that the network was overloaded by the huge numbers trying to make alternative travel arrangements.

There is some experience with these ash plumes shutting down jet engines. It definitely doesn't take much.

It might be possible to design a jet engine that could operate in that environment but that would probably require accepting a bunch of trade-offs to handle a rare situation, i.e. economy would be very bad.

I understand British SAR services are still open, but working on a case-by-case basis. I take that to mean they're only doing cases needing surface activities for now.

Photograph of the Icelandic Volcanic fallout from my front door step looking skyward in a south easterly direction taken at around 16:54 BST. Its so exciting to make the world wide news media following a natural disaster as nothing much happens around here in this part of the world. Now where on earth is that sarcasm smiley.

I do an occasional same-day fly in/fly out business trips and my coworkers always wonder why I bring an overnight bag with clothes and toileties. I keep telling them a ticket home is not a guarentee.

An now for the tinfoil portion of the show, what if this no-flight thing was enacted by the Powers That Be for something else and the volcano was just an excuse...

-Blast

It seems volcanic ashes is not something to be taken lightly... All air movement over Northern Europe is essentially stopped.

Some effects of volcanic ash on air planes (from recent news articles).

- Sealing off vents and openings that are supposed to be open. Like pivot tubes (air speed gauge). Pilots don't like that, for some reason.

- Sandblasting anything that's on the outside: Fuselage, engines, windows, instruments...

- Causing havoc inside the engines. Among other things, it melts (it's partly very fine powdered glass particles) and sticks to parts that are not supposed to be covered in glass.

- Creating unpleasant atmosphere inside the air craft.

That you don't see any from the ground doesn't mean there aren't any particles to create problems.

I was halfway supposed to be flying today, but was told I could skip that meeting. Stroke of luck, I guess... Alternative transport to get home would be at least 8 hours by train or bus, and tickets to those are not exactly abundant at the moment.

I was expecting a spectacular sunset this evening with the supposed high level volcanic fallout dust, but nothing out of the ordinary I'm afraid.

So America is completely cut off ?

Pretty wild. A bit scary if you know what ash can do to a jet engine and what happens to airlines when the engines stop working, they pretty much fall out of the sky.

I take this as a call for diversity. Ash does a number on jet engines but trains and ocean liners are much more tolerant. The experts expect this to be a short term event but there is nothing that says it has to be. This sucker could potentially be pumping out ash for years.

Back in the 40s and 50s ocean liners used to ply the US to England route and make the run in about three and a half days. Slow by modern standards but sitting at an airport waiting it may take many a passengers longer. And going by ocean liner is not a bad way to travel. Rail, particularly high-speed rail, could replace many airline flights across the country.

Having options is valuable enough that it could pay to subsidize alternative means. It isn't like we don't subsidize airlines by building airports and operating an air traffic control system. We all pay a penalty for carrying a spare tire. The small decrease in fuel efficiency is offset by the peace of mind and the option of self-rescue.

There's always the Rio Grande.

The best photos I've seen of the volcano - some are gorgeous. Am shocked at how close some peops are getting to the lava.

I'd love to see it in person. I'm a volcano nut, once upon a time aspiring geologist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...ST2010041501422



The paralysis that began in London and Paris soon spread to Hong Kong and Tokyo, to Nairobi and Buenos Aires, and to New York and both of the Washington area's international airports. It was, by all accounts, one of the most bizarre acts of nature ever to constrict world travel, and it grounded tens of thousands of passengers internationally.

Until the eruption, which began last month, Iceland's long volcanic history was little known beyond trivia games, but as that legacy surfaced Thursday, so did news that the last time the Eyjafjallajokull volcano exploded -- 187 years ago -- the eruptions went on for more than a year.

Officials were at a loss to predict how long it would take for the ash to dissipate or for flights to resume.

... the cloud that hung over Europe was so high -- between 20,000 and 36,000 feet -- that it wasn't visible from the ground and health authorities said it posed no immediate danger.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/15/AR2010041500560.html?hpid=artslot

London to Paris is quicker by train (2hours) than plane already -
same goes for most cities in europe less than 500mi apart.

By the time you have spent an hour getting out to the airport, an hour or two at checkin, an hour flying and an hour getting into the city center at the other end - a 190mph train is pretty efficient.

"The ash from the volcano ... was reported to be drifting at 18,000 to 33,000 feet above the earth. At those altitudes, the cloud is directly in the way of commercial airliners but not an immediate health threat to people on the ground..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/world/europe/17ash.html

Sue

I would have no problem at all with an ocean voyage. Catch up on some sleep, do some reading, arrive at your destination rested. You need a couple of days to recover from the the stress of air travel and the time change anyway, so you're not losing that much time. Bring back the ocean liner I say!

Heard an interview on the radio with a scientist from Iceland today. He said the previous eruption of this volcano went on for a year. And isn't there a much larger volcano right next to it thats also a major concern? Just read this on Wiki .

so Icland vocano goes off, China has a earthquake, and we have another earthquake here in the US (very small one in the US) does anyone else here seem to think that something is afoot? or am I seeing too much into this?

I am in agreement with all of you that sugested the re-visiting of Train, and boat travel. I once saw and advertisement that said a CSX train could do 70 miles on one gallon of diesel fule and moving something like 80tons of material. If that is even half accurate then it makes plane travle look like a grose misuse of fule. But I am no expert and only make these asumption on what I hear and what I saw, and I have not done any research tof back this up or validate these statements. just a loosly put together thought.

To illustrate some of the consequences of shutting down the air space: All air ambulance or rescue helicopters are grounded. Two incidents have surfaced so far, several more to come:

- A heart problem had to go by supply vessel (12 hour journey) from oil platform to shore, and then by ambulance to hospital. Compare that with a round trip flight time of one hour, i.e. wait for less than half an hour, then less than half an hour flight time that takes you to the top of the hospital.

- A guy with an amputated hand and the only hospital capable of fixing that is on the other side of the country. The regular 8 hour car ride was done in ambulance in 6 hour, which is according to his doctor is "within the time frame for these kind of operations". You have to experience the really bad Norwegian roads to really appreciate what that ambulance driver managed to pull off. (Hint: In the U.S. I use a 60 miles per hour for a conservative estimate of my average speed including breaks and minor traffic delays. In rural parts of Norway, I use 37 miles per hour... (60 km/h).)


Not much we can do about it. Luckily, once you're in the hands of professionals, time of transport is rarely THAT critical. Still, some poor sod is inevitably going to die if this lasts.

Rail is far more efficient than any of the other current forms of ground travel. Air travel is for speed, not for fuel conservation. People talk about conservation, but what they really want is speed.

According to the Association of American Railroads, a freight train can haul one ton of freight coast to coast (~3,000 miles) on seven gallons of fuel; a semi-truck would take 27 gallons to haul the same weight the same distance.
Railroads: Green from the Start

An article by UK Parliament shows that
Passenger rail (diesel) w/90 people aboard= 182 mpg/per passenger
Buses carrying 9 people (avg # per load) = 98 mpg/per passenger
Air (long haul) w/300 people = 66 mpg/per passenger
Air (short haul) w/100 people = 40 mpg/per passenger
UK Passenger Transport: Fuel Consumption

Sue

Yep I'm afraid so. But don't worry, you can phone us still.

New Tourism Motto:

Thanks to Iceland, What happens in Europe, Stays in Europe

Hmm, Dutch KLM test flights have shown no adverse affects on commercial airliners, yet UK airspace remains closed. But no worries though Gordo has sent in the Royal Navy's flag ship the Ark Royal to save the day in the best of the Dunkirk Spirit. Apparently we are all in this together made for a future fair for all.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8628878.stm

Oh BTW, there's an election campaign on at the moment. Now where on earth is that sarcasm smilie again.

A few test flights didn't have any "detectable" problems, so they want the restrictions lifted? But if a jet then finds a strata of denser ash and has to make an emergency landing, or crashes, they'll be screaming "It's not our fault, the government said it was safe to fly!"

No one has ever died in an airliner crash from volcanic ash ingestion on turbofan engines of a jet liner even during the well published history of the KLM and BA jets that have effectively flown directly through the volcanic ash plume directly above an active volcano. I am currently directly under the invisible undetectable ash cloud right now and there is no ash fallout despite the propaganda and news media reports (Grampian local TV News usually can only report news stories about fish and football, of course they are going to cream themselves if they thought they could report volcanic ash falling out of the sky in the Shetland islands and making it to US news channel like CNN, Fox etc). Even the news media volcanic ash 'sunset' photos are bogus and just check out the the bottom photo on this link.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8625813.stm

Just how misleading does that photo get for the ill informed public.

The test flights would have been through the darkest light pinkish brown smudges on the satellite photo, i.e. the worse case scenerio. Nothing happened to the test flights.

Well a BA 747 (Speedbird 9) did get in to trouble in 1982. Losing all 4 engines and getting “ sandblasted’ by the dust. Fortunately they were able to restart the engines and land safely.

The BA 747 flight in 1982 flew directly through the ash flume directly above the volcano in Indonesia, which had erupted a few hours before with no warning to make a course diversion around the volcanic plume. There is a difference between

http://www.amfearliathmor.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/DSCF7023.JPG

and this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8627956.stm

Is "probably safe" good enough when it involves literally thousands of people?

Or do the economic considerations outweigh the (probably low) risks?


I'm so glad I am not responsible for any of those decisions.

Here's a recent article on How Does Volcanic Ash Affect Aircraft .

I thought it might be affecting radar more than engines, but that wasn't true.

Sue

Today's meeting of relevant EU (and some non-EU) ministers of transportation point towards a relaxation of the rules, identifying zones of low, medium and high ash concentration and allowing all, some or no air movements within those zones.

And... from Iceland the report is that the current ash release does not reach as high into the atmosphere. Most likely that ash will fall down before reaching mainland Europe. We still have to cope with whatever left of the high altitude ash, but that will eventually fall down or be transported elsewhere.


Now we just have to wait for the big volcano Katla to erupt. When that happens, it will put the current eruption into perspective. Historically, the record indicates that Eyjafjallajökul eruptions precede Katla eruptions (3 out of 3 so far, and this is eruption number 4 that we have historical records of). No one can can be 100% sure if that this will happen this time, though.


UK: "CASH! We want CASH! Send us our cash, not ash, you blimey dyslectic Icelandic idiots"
ICELAND: "Cash? Ooopps... sorry".
(For our non-European friends: Big Icelandic banks went bust and blew a lot of money from quite a number of British citizens. They are quite eager to get it back... )

Engine teardown or more flight hours after the damage has been incurred (and engine failures) may be needed to know.

NASA writeup of what the damage looks like even though it may be undetectable initially:

http://www.alpa.org/portals/alpa/volcanicash/03_NASADC8AshDamage.pdf

Just because no one has died yet from commercial airliners ingesting ash doesn't mean they could re-use the airplane.

How would overhauling the engines after each flight raise costs???

Time-lapse video of ash spread from the Norwegian Meteorlogical office. Click here to watch. Pretty cool.

At the time KLM made the "no adverse" announcement on Sunday they had not yet taken the engines apart for inspection. So all they know is that the engines didn't fail during that flight, not whether they'd survive even another 100 hours without failure.

NATO has taken apart a couple of engines from fighters that did have damage from this ash cloud.

The ash cloud does not extend uniformly from ground-level upwards: vertical wind sheer means many altitudes are ash-free, yet a few thousand feet above or below have ash.

"Big Icelandic banks went bust and blew a lot of money from quite a number of British citizens. They are quite eager to get it back..."

Bloody huge letter bomb somebody sent... they really must have been peeved!

Very dramatic photo of the volcanic cloud, compliments of NASA: Fire and ash

Sue

Some stranded tourists are probably thinking more along the lines of Hotel California "... you can never leave"!

Imagine if this had taken place at a peak vacation travel period.

If the EU allows flight then the FAA in the USA has a problem: do they require tear-downs of those engines before allowing them into the US? And will the Chinese allow those airplanes? (China has a very strong aviation safety record in the last few years, better than the US)

Ash damage to turbine engines and other airplane systems can be very subtle. The hot sections of modern jet engines have very tight operating tolerances and operate very near the temperature limits of the materials involved. Minor loss in cooling efficiency or excess wear could lead to at least a loss of efficiency and increases the possibly of several different engine failure scenarios.

For Commercial Air Transport flights (Airlines) the general rule is to keep the likelihood of a catastrophic failure (one leading to the loss of the airplane) to less than one chance in 1,000,000,000 hours. This focus on safety leads to a very conservative approach to managing the airspace when things like volcanic ash are floating around. Loss of an engine, or even significantly reduced performance from one or more engines is a significant flight hazard.

- Eric

Hmm, strange happenings again, another ash cloud was reported to be on its way this morning, but now for some reason all airports within the UK will now be operating normally but with some limited restrictions on some airspace routes. Must have started to run out of Kiwi fruits, Asparagus and Mange Tout at Notting Hill Sainsbury's.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8633601.stm

The airlines operating in the UK are complaining about Britain being overly cautious. Evidently other nations restarted flights much earlier. Report on NPR was that the airlines were losing $200 million a day they were shut down.

I suspect that this is one of those times when government is going to get thrashed either way. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. They have to make the call and expect the complaints.

It has to be pointer out that, as one person put it on the radio, 'It is better to be on the ground wishing you were flying than flying wishing you were on the ground'.

Modern jet aircraft have roughly the same glide characteristics as a brick if all the engines stop. Even one engine out is a flight emergency. Also that $200 million would just about make the down payments on the legal costs of 200 people dead in a plane crash. And that only if it comes down in a friendly, uninhabited, area. Take out a high-rise full of people or a nuclear power plant while struggling to make the airport and things could get downright expensive.

True, better safe than sorry.

On the other side, there are lots and lots of indications that the issue with flying through thin ash clouds is more about drastically shortened life span of engines. The risk of engines stopping dead in air seems to be slim to non-existent. Trouble is - it is hard to guarantee, and the expert just don't know enough about it. Yet.

This is not correct. Modern jets are very aerodynamically clean and glide quite well thank you. Lets not exaggerate the seriousness of the situation beyond reality.


See "Gimli Glider" ( aka Air Canada Flt 143)

See the story of Air Transat Flt 236 pumping all fuel overboard mid-ocean due to an undiagnosed fuel leak and landing as a glider in the Azores.

And don't forget the recent ditching into the Hudson. That was a most excellent glider flight ending in a fine landing in the safest place available.

All airplanes are gliders at heart. Bricks are just projectiles.

18:1 glide ratio is a number that comes to mind for jets. I've flown sailplanes with a much worse glide ratio.

It's not the glide characteristics that are the problem. It's the uncertainty about where the aircraft might revert to unplanned gliding as well as any additional damage due to engine spontaneous disassembly that can cause really big issues.

Gliding is GOOD! (says the former glider flight instructor)

To add to what unimogbert said, modern commercial aircraft are designed to maximize lift and minimize drag for fuel efficiency. This also maximizes their glide performance.

One engine going out is considered an emergency because if you don't know why that engine quit, you don't know if the others are about to quit, too. So you want to get that plane back on the ground as soon as you can.

I looked up glide ratios of passenger jets in the past and was surprised at the variability of answers. The 12-16:1 range comes up most frequently, but also some references as low as 3-4:1 (especially when flown "heavy") and also as high as 28:1 for an MD-80 on one website. Wow, really, 28:1?!

+1 on the glidability of commercial aircraft. I can remember two incidents (besides the one into the Hudson) without looking them up.

There was the Air Canada aircraft that ran out of fuel (fueling error when metric replaced gallons) at cruising altitude, and ended up doing a glider landing at an unused air force base, where a bunch of people were all watching drag races with their backs to the silent aircraft. One kid turned his head in time to clear the runway.

The other was a China Air flight that was coming into (I think) San Jose, CA. The last I heard, the fuel lines had frozen. They were a glider for the ten minutes it took for the lower altitude and warmer temps to thaw the lines so the crew could get the engines started again. IIRC, when they got the engines restarted they were only 1500' off the ground.

Both of these were in the 80s.

Sue

As with anything the lift to drag ratio is a variable for any aircraft, which depends on the Altitude, glide speed, payload etc.

The LD ratio is proportional to the square root of the wing aspect ratio divided by the zero lift drag coefficient. So just by looking at an aircraft such as the Boeing dreamliner or DH Comet 4, they will have an excellent LD ratio because of high aspect ratio wing. Aspect ratio is equal to the square of the wing span divided by the wing planform area. So aircraft with long narrow wings will have the greatest LD or glide ratio.

Concorde for example will have a glide ratio of between 4 and 7 depending on its speed and altitude due to the supersonic capable small aspect wing ratio and large overall wing area making it the fastest jet aircraft in the world including all in service types including all civilian or military types.

Well, there you go! Another example of why we need crash whistles installed on all planes (a reference to another recent thread)! LOL

Of course, they would need to be made loud enough to be heard over the sound of cars drag racing to be truly effective.

The ups and down of closing airspace because of ash:
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/04/eyjafjallajokull_flight_cancel.php

Yup, clearly a damned if you do -- damned if you don't situation for aviation authorities.

The ash, it turns out, is actually the smoking remains of the crashed Icelandic economy...

“I’m stuck in Europe because of an Icelandic ash-hole!”

It was, and is, well known that volcano ash plumes can damage airplanes in flight to the point of immediate failure. In the (very) few cases of engine shutdown the engines were restarted before impact but there's no reason to believe that was anything other than random chance.

It was known by Sunday that *this* volcanic ash plume could damage airplanes. The KLM exec who flew on a test flight and proclaimed "I didn't crash!" neglected to mention the aircraft that did sustain engine damage, and that KLM had not taken apart their engines to see if they had suffered the kind of damage this ash plume was known to cause.

The problem is that nobody has a map of where the debris will go. Vertical wind sheer means different altitudes have different danger areas, and I don't know if there is any way to detect it remotely. Iceland isn't going anywhere and as long as the Jet Stream is in the region, this can happen - time to fund some research on volcanic debris plume composition and dispersal.

Overall I think the EU authorities made the right decisions for the right reasons, and the airlines are being dishonest and deceptive in their arguments.

Time to repack that travel bag with underwear and socks that can be washed in a sink and dry overnight... I'd not sure there is a "dries overnight" shirt or pants? A week of prescriptions may be to little... ...time to look at that bag again.

Fascinating lengthy article in the April 24 Wall Street Journal on how the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia caused global cooling that reverberated around the world in ways big and small. The article also compares it to the current Iceland eruption, Krakatoa, Mt. St. Helens and others.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...IDDLESecondNews

* APRIL 24, 2010

Eruptions and Disruptions

Iceland's volcano pales before giants that may have sped U.S. settlers and led to 'Frankenstein'


"...crop failures dotted the northern hemisphere—rice failed in parts of China, wheat and corn in Europe, potatoes in Ireland (where it rained nonstop for eight weeks and triggered a typhus epidemic that killed 65,000 and spread to England and Europe). At Lake Geneva in Switzerland, vacationers from England sat out gloomy June storms reading ghost stories and composing their own. Lord Byron wrote a narrative poem, "Darkness," in which there was no sun, "no day." His personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, wrote "The Vampyre," and Mary Shelley began "Frankenstein." Famine spread across Switzerland. Food riots and insurrections swept France, which had already been caught up in the chaos following Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo.

"In New England, 1816 was called "the year without a summer" because there were crop-killing frosts every month, including the normally frost-free months of summer, across the region.

"It snowed in Virginia in June and again on the Fourth of July."

And more pics of the Icelend volcano and the northern lights, which the ash is making more spectacular than usual.

Incredibly beautiful color.

The link is enormous so know that the slideshow can be found in the article I linked to in the previous post.