Heavily-regulated, ever-cautious Europe reacted slowly to the ash-cloud aviation emergency, but lessons have been learned that might help us cope if Eyjafjallajökull’s neighbouring volcano, Katla, erupts
AS EUROPE'S skies closed down nine days ago, a young Polish soprano called Aleksandra Kurzak found herself stranded in Warsaw with little more than 24 hours to go before she was due on stage in London to sing in Il Turco in Italia, an operatic farce by Rossini.
There was nothing for it but to dash across the continent by taxi, a 19-hour haul that just about got her on time to the stage at the Royal Opera House. The driver didn’t charge the diva. He was going to London anyway.
The show must go on, and in Kurzak’s case it did, just about. But for millions of air passengers last week, there was no show at all.
As the last of these people finally make their weary way home from the far-flung corners of the globe this weekend, the threat of further disruption for months to come – from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption and from a bigger volcano nearby – still exists. The question now is: how vulnerable are we to another such event?
Much less so, says Brian Flynn, the Dubliner who was thrust forward during the crisis as the public voice of the Brussels-based aviation body Eurocontrol. “The models that are used to track and predict the current and likely spread of contamination from the volcanic ash cloud have been fine-tuned and calibrated,” he says. This follows “hundreds” of discussions in recent days between volcanologists, meteorologists, airframe and engine makers, airlines, pilots and regulators.
Using fresh knowledge, experts have reached a new consensus on the tolerance levels of aircraft to ash in areas with low ash density. In addition, lessons learned in this episode means the authorities are better-equipped to gauge conditions in a volcanic plume.
Still, it remains the case that that each of Eyjafjallajökull’s previous three eruptions – in 920AD, 1612 and 1821-1823 – was followed by an eruption of the larger Katla volcano nearby, which last disgorged explosive materials into the sky in 1918.
“It could be just pure coincidence, but if we’re to follow the historical record, we’d have to say there’d be an eruption of Katla within a few months to a couple of years,” says Dr Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist with the Open University in Leeds.
Given Katla’s record, McGarvie says the explosive effusions from Eyjafjallajökull could prove “fairly mild” by comparison. “The 1918 eruption lasted for 24 days; the estimation was that the eruption column height went up into the atmosphere for 14km or 45,000 feet, compared with only 33,000 feet for the current eruption.”
By way of illustration, he says an eruption in 1991 of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines rose to an estimated 45,000 feet and spread ash across 5,000 miles over three days. While other factors would certainly come into play, this shows Katla’s potential for disruption.
“Compared to the current eruption, the big difference with a large Katla eruption such as the 1918 one is that there would be a lot more ash in the middle atmosphere, which is where planes cruise. The wind patterns are different to those we have in the lower atmosphere and can be more difficult to predict.”
For all that, Eurocontrol is confident new rules and standards will in future enable regulators and airlines to determine with greater precision where the risks from volcanic ash actually lie – without compromising safety.
The new system imposes a strict no-fly zone, surrounded by a wide buffer, where ash is heavily concentrated. It also empowers local regulators to permit test flights to assess conditions in zones that could be deemed safe for restricted flights. In a third category of unrestricted airspace, flights are permitted as normal.
European transport ministers unanimously approved these measures last Monday, a move that was followed by the gradual resumption of flights from some of the world’s busiest airports. That no incidents were reported as thousands of planes took again to the skies shows the new system can work.
ALTHOUGH QUESTIONS remain as to whether the authorities overreacted, the relative calm since ministers relaxed the emergency measures is in contrast with the fraught mood that prevailed in the early days of what turned out to be the biggest peacetime shutdown of European aviation.
“The disruption has been enormous and unprecedented in European aviation,” says Flynn. “The atmosphere has been very stressful . . . People were working non-stop.” In the space of a few hours, paralysis gripped the routine business of air travel as Europe’s fragmented aviation system was overwhelmed by a series of unpredictable, uncontrollable events.
Was this costly disruption avoidable? The point was made many times last week that eruptions in the US and Asia never led to a shutdown of this scale. Was a total stoppage the right reaction? Or was it a typically over-cautious European response to a problem?
In normal weather, the winds might have blown the volcanic ash straight to the North Pole. Last week, however, light prevailing winds held the ash in a steady position over northern Europe. In line with the findings of computer simulations – findings which ultimately proved flawed – vast swathes of airspace were shut.
Tales of fortitude and desperation abound. A branch of the rental group Avis reported customers hiring cars in Bergen, Norway to drive to Lisbon, Portugal – a journey of more than 3,700 km.
Others accustomed to five-star living re-entered the hardy world of ordinary folk. Estonian president Toomas Ilves took a bus home from Turkey, stopping for coffee at roadside fuel stations as he travelled through nine countries in four days. Liverpool’s millionaire footballers were corralled onto trains to Bordeaux to make flights for a match in Spanish capitals. Their troubles were in vain. They succumbed 1-0 to local heroes Atlético Madrid.
AT THE ROOT of this shutdown was a fear of catastrophe if planes suck ash into their engines. “Since volcanic ash is composed of very abrasive silica materials, it can damage the airframe and flight surfaces, clog different systems, abrade cockpit windows and flame-out jet engines, constituting a serious safety hazard,” says the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in Montreal.
The most commonly cited example of this happening is the case from June 1982 of a British Airways Boeing 747, en route to Australia from Malaysia, whose four engines shut down one after another when it unknowingly flew into a volcanic ash plume over Indonesia. In 15 terrifying minutes, the jumbo descended by 20,000 feet. Only when it reached below the cloud was the crew able to regain engine control by feeding clean air into the turbines.
“That was four on the scale of one to four in the severity of incidents,” says Denis Chagnon of the ICAO. Records suggest 89 planes flew into ash clouds between 1953 and 2008. Chagnon says none crashed, although some came close to disaster. So the perils are clear.
Thus the commanders of European aviation were confronted with a daunting responsibility when Eyjafjallajökull started spewing gas, dust, glass and other debris into the atmosphere last week.
However, the decision to open or shut airspace is entirely national, meaning it was individual government agencies as far apart as Dublin and Moscow which moved one-by-one to close down the skies.
In many ways, they had no choice. Any flouting of scientific advice from the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in London – the designated regional authority, which deployed risk assessment models agreed by the countries themselves – could have put numerous lives at risk. Apart from the human cost of any crash, such an eventuality would have been ruinous politically for any government or airline that wilfully ignored the experts.
Whereas the emergency response was instant, the authorities appeared to lose crucial momentum over the weekend as the ash showed no signs of dissipating. Seen from the outside, a sense of drift seemed to kick in. There were constant meetings in Eurocontrol, but little coordination and plenty of indecision, as national officials fretted over test flights.
“A crash and your government falls,” said a source familiar with these discussions.
Crucial here was the fact that control over the contaminated airspace was shared between two dozen or so national authorities. No body was empowered to order flights. Just a handful of test flights by commercial airlines took place on Saturday, for example.
A good many more were carried out without incident on Sunday – by airlines such as Air France-KLM and Lufthansa – clearing the way for the eventual political decision to change the rules. But that didn’t happen until late on Monday. “It took three days to take a decision that should have taken a couple of hours,” the source said ruefully.
But these tests were not the first flights to examine air conditions over Europe. “There were military aircraft flying left, right and centre,” says another figure familiar with events in the background. “So why didn’t they give the information? It was because of military secrecy.”
All the while the meter of lost airline revenue advanced – with airlines revving up pressure on the public authorities throughout the weekend. And businesses throughout the world were suffering too, their sophisticated “just-in-time” delivery systems foiled by a perplexing evaporation of supplies. In Japan, the Nissan motor company suspended production of some US-bound cars because it was unable to import pneumatic sensors from Ireland.
SO BY THE TIME EU ministers started a phone and video conference on Monday afternoon – briefly delayed as officials tried to establish simultaneous contact on jammed networks with 27 capital cities – grave doubts about the extent of the measures taken were already well-aired.
That morning Giovanni Bisignani, chief of the International Air Transport Association (Iata) had sent a stiff message to Brussels warning of dire consequences for airlines from the blanket closure of airspace and complaining of key decisions based more on theory than fact.
“We are far enough into this crisis to express our dissatisfaction on how governments have managed the crisis: with no risk assessment, no consultation, no coordination, and no leadership,” he said. In Brussels, however, the European Commission has been at pains to point out that control over airspace was not in the EU bailiwick at all.
Sources in the EU’s executive arm said it intervened to take a coordinating role on the second day of the crisis because there was a pressing need to reassert order – and because of rising calls from airlines to revise the safety rules that had grounded tens of thousands of flights. Because there was little central control over airspace, no country acting on its own could take a first step in introducing change.
Even while Eurocontrol’s 38 member countries hammered out the new rules, the highest-ranking official in the Commission’s transport division was highlighting serious shortcomings in the computer models that led to the flight closures.
Director general for Energy and Transport Matthias Ruete said many of the assumptions in the computer models were based on incomplete science. Speaking before new ash tolerance levels for aircraft were agreed, Ruete said the European authorities did not know at what density ash cloud affects jet engines.
Brian Flynn of Eurocontrol says the Commission is entitled to give its opinions but says he is not in a position to comment on “political statements” it makes. Throughout the crisis, however, the consistent mantra has been that the measures taken were what was required to ensure safety.
“This has been dreadful for Europe, definitely. But with any safety risk that occurs, the first response must be to stop aircraft flying,” Flynn says.
Even while the ICAO says “more effort” is now required to establish a global safety risk system for volcanic ash, Chagnon maintains the initial response achieved exactly what it was designed to do. “The system worked beautifully well because there were no accidents, no incidents and no injuries whatsoever.”
All involved say the situation was entirely without precedent. Ruete told reporters he was old enough to remember how the European authorities struggled in the 1980s to assess the risks to human health from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The shutdown was akin to that frightful experience in that it raised the spectre of a grave threat to life in a scenario in which variable forces of unknown potency were at work. Now, the push has now begun to overcome long-standing political resistance to a Single European Sky – which means exactly what it says.
Nevertheless, contrasts have been drawn between the response in Europe and its US counterpart. Cultural differences are discernible. In the American model, for example, it is for pilots themselves to decide where to fly on the basis of information on airspace conditions from the public authorities. Even if this reflects a gung-ho spirit in which the demands of business tend to prevail, a figure as eminent as Ruete himself has acknowledged that the US system is no less safe.
In briefing documents, however, the Commission says it wants the European system “to be safer” by ensuring that the assessment is done by those with the best information and fewest vested interests.
Critics say the entire episode smacks of a European over-reliance on the “precautionary principle”, which holds that something should not be allowed to take place until its safety is proven.
“We want globalisation but we don’t want the risks associated with that. In western Europe, we want a totally open world but one that is 100 per cent safe,” says Fabrice Pothier, director of the Carnegie Europe think-tank in Brussels. The ultimate lesson, argues Pothier, is for the European system to accord the risk of a large infrastructure crisis a status equivalent to that of a serious security threat and act accordingly.
No lives were lost in Eyjafjallajökull’s fiery outbreak. But if Katla blows up, Europe’s governments would have to do better than to wait five days for an emergency meeting. Hoping the ash blows away fixes nothing.
