European Ash Cloud Woes

[Jay-qu]

Unless you have been hiding under a rock this past week you have no doubt heard about the large volcano in Iceland that has wreaked havoc on European air travel. The volcano is (partly?) under the Eyjafjallajökull glacier, which apparently caused the eruption to emit more ash than normal. The ash, though almost invisible by the time it spread to Europe, is thought to cause jet engines to fail and so most or northern European airspace was closed.

 

It has now been 5 days and airspace still remains closed in most of the affected countries, while tests have shown no damage to planes.. The EU leadership has been criticized heavily for the way they dealt (or didn't deal) with this situation, people are eager to point the finger when the bill is estimated at ~$2 billion...

 

So, here is a thread to discuss the volcano, how the situation could have been handled better, the effect (or absence) of the ash on jet engines and any personal accounts of being trapped in Europe - what a terrible life it must be for those stuck on holiday..

 

Some stunning images:

[alexander]

the effect (or absence) of the ash on jet engines

Quite significant, volcano ash will reak havoc on any engine, remembering right that it's incredibly fine and rich in silicon (glass), ever work with fiber glass with no gloves, anyways so it will be highly abbrasive to anything, especially an engine as complicated and detailed as a jet engine. In a car engine, it will either clog up the air filter so badly that the car wont be able to breathe, or if it manages to get through, it will scratch the cylinder walls, either causing the engine to seize or wearing out the cylinder walls incredibly fast, anyways, engine=dead both ways. In an aircraft engine, that sucks a lot of air for the combustion, and glass melts at 1100C, where your typical GE turbine operates at around 1400C, so the glass, now melted starts settling on blades (which are internally cooled), and other parts, slowly building up, and starting to either solidify and seize parts, or unbalance blades (and thats baaaad considering they are normally operating at 20-30000 rpm)

 

personal accounts... well i had a plane all loaded up with marshmallows and chocolate, and they canceled all flights... how am i going to roast the biggest smores ever attempted.... :naughty:

[Turtle]

better safe than sorry. what do you think the lawsuits would cost the industry(s) if a plane or 2 went down because of ash? :naughty: bunch of greedy damn whiners. :) by the by, how could the whiners know if there was no damage to commercial engines if no commercial planes were flying? :hyper: moreover, i just saw on the telly a report showing damage to a european fighter. :lol:

 

The Associated Press: NATO: F-16 fighters damaged by volcanic ash

 

mother nature; what a biotch. :lol:

[Buffy]

One of my favorite bloggers on flying has some answers:

I've been asked why flights headed beyond Europe simply cannot overfly the cloud, since it reportedly tops out at around 35,000 feet, well below the ceilings of most commercial planes. One problem here is that a flight always must be able to descend to 10,000 feet in the event of a pressurization failure. This is true even when flying over high mountains; there is always an escape route that will allow for descent in a relatively short amount of time.

 

Another question I'm getting is why, flying between the U.S. and Europe, planes cannot circumvent the cloud by taking a southerly track across the ocean? The problem with this is mostly one of fuel capacity. Such a routing would be a lot longer in terms of miles, meaning longer flight times and probable payload restrictions. The reason commercial planes trace a northerly route between the U.S. and Europe, passing along the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland, and the U.K., is because that's the shortest distance -- a so-called great circle route. Going straight across the ocean between, say, New York and Rome, is considerably longer.

 

Below the cloud? Again there are fuel issues. Plus, the exact location and density of the ash is variable.

And as to that liability that Turtle mentions, Capt. Smith points out there have been a bunch incidents of total engine failure, several with fatalities, two from flying through volcanic ash since the 1970s:

Southern Airways Flight 242 (1977). Severe hail and water ingestion. Fatalities: 72

United Flight 173 (1978). Crew error and fuel starvation. Fatalities: 10

British Airways Flight 009 (1982). Volcanic ash. Fatalities: 0

Air Canada Flight 143 (1983). Human error and fuel starvation. Fatalities: 0

TACA Flight 110 (1988). Severe rain ingestion. Fatalities: 0

KLM Flight 867 (1989). Volcanic ash. Fatalities: 0

Varig Flight 254 (1989). Crew error and fuel starvation. Fatalities: 13

SAS Flight 751 (1991). Severe ice ingestion. Fatalities: 0

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 (1996). Hijacking and fuel starvation. Fatalities: 125

Hapag-Lloyd Flight 3378 (2000). Crew error, mechanical problem. Fatalities: 0

Air Transat Flight 236 (2001). Mechanical problem and fuel starvation. Fatalities: 0

British Airways Flight 38 (2008) Mechanical problem. Fatalities: 0

US Airways Flight 1549 (2009). Multiple bird strike. Fatalities: 0

Given the above, the bean counters have a tough call between losing all the income from those flights and the bazillions each crash/fatality costs to the bottom line.

 

Don't'cha just love how it always comes down to money?

 

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk, :naughty:

Buffy

[Jay-qu]

Of course i dont doubt that volcanic ash can and has caused planes damaged - what instead I was referring to was the fact that KLM and Lufthansa both apparently flew test flights in Europe (obviously in a less dense area of the cloud) and the planes had no observable damage.

 

That said, of course I would always er on the side of caution and not fly.

[sanctus]

But Jay, can you send a link where it is criticised how it is handled? I did not read something like that here under the cloud ;-)

[Eclogite]

Quite significant, volcano ash will reak havoc on any engine, remembering right that it's incredibly fine and rich in silicon (glass),

Not so. This is a basaltic eruption (Iceland is a MORB province) so there should be no free silica at all. You are dealing instead with olivine (or pyroxene) and feldspar. The olivine (generally a minor constituent) is about the same or slightly softer than steel. The feldspar is softer. On Moh's scale of hardness - a semi-quantitative scale used by geologists - quartz (7) is harder than steel (6.5), but steel is harder than feldspar(6) and pyroxene (5 to 6) and about the same as olivine (6 to 6.5). The abrasiveness of the ash will consequently be much less than would be the case with eruption of an acidic ash high in silica.

 

That said, the infamous BA009, which suffered failure of all four engines was subject to an ash cloud of similar composition from the Mount Galunggung eruption in 1982. The damage to that plane, however, was related more to the concentration of particles than to their mineral composition.

[Jay-qu]

But Jay, can you send a link where it is criticised how it is handled? I did not read something like that here under the cloud ;-)

Many places:

IATA sharply criticized European governments for their lack of leadership in handling airspace restrictions | INTERNATIONAL AVIATION NEWS

Europe to Ease Aviation Ban, Amid Criticism - NYTimes.com

Airline body IATA and airline executives criticize Europe airspace closure - International Business Times

 

Unfortunately we probably wont be seeing a global cooling effect like some people were hoping for:Volcanic ash unlikely to cool planet - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[alexander]

Eclogite, thanks for the insight, actually that explains why they are not as afraid of flying planes, but flying through a dense cloud of even silica-free dust can cause bad things to happen in turbofans. Granted there are operating procedures to fly through clouds like that, SOP is usually, cut the engine power down as much as possible (causes it to spin slower, pull through a lot less air and operate at a lower temperature), and try to get through/below the cloud as soon as you can, then power the engine back up to spin it up, which should clear out any minor blockages that could have happened. Flying in a dense cloud for a prolonged time will still cause issues of dust build up which can unbalance the engine, or seize something, for example high quantities of dust can significantly block the can, or melted residue can cause some fuel injectors to not function causing the engine to be deprived of power, or cloging parts of the low pressure turbine (from talking to a jet engine engineer, that system is usually much more prone to blockage), and that can cause significant loss of thrust, and a decrease in cooling capacity of the engine, which means that the high pressure turbine wont run at it's normal capacity either, which once again may add to a significant loss of thrust.

 

But anyways, with silicate-free or nearly free ash, it is much less likely to cause engine problems, but the reason airliners were grounded is not necessarily that they knew that they couldn't fly, most likely nothing really bad would have happened, but, one, they didn't want to try, i mean knowing that there is a heightened possibility of engine failure, would you want to get on a plane? and two, damaged engines, even damaged a little, would take a lot more maintenance costs, i mean turbine engines are costly to maintain to begin with, parts get ridiculously expensive, and then there is the abrasive factor on the body of the plane that you have to deal with; i dont know if you've seen pictures of the planes that flew through the cloud, but they landed looking like they just went through a paint stripping chamber. So there is that cost to think about too.

 

Point being that airlines were right about not letting any air traffic through, and yes there are losses that they will have to make up, and business losses in europe in an already weak economy. But i think the risk, and what it would cost the airlines to operate was not worth it...

[C1ay]

I tend to look at many things in life like this as a gamble, weighing the potential gains against the potential losses, in order to assess what is really worth it or not. In this situation I see the potential gains as restored air traffic and the potential loss as human lives. Are the potential gains worth the potential losses? Not in my opinion. Assured safety should come first.

[alexander]

You are absolutely right, clay, as you, i can not put a price on a life, even of bad people...

[Tormod]

It's surprising how enormous the impact of the eruption has been here in Europe. In Norway there have been no flights since around Thursday last week, causing chaos in virtually all other modes of transport.

 

Some days we could smell sulphur from the volcano! Although we haven't seen the cloud (AFAIK) there have been numerous health hazard warnings. As an asthmatic I haven't really felt any different this past week, so I am not sure how it really impacts people's health.

 

I have a colleague who is stranded in Switzerland, so we've had to conduct meetings over cell phones.

 

For a Nordic company like the one I work for, no flights is a serious business challenge. But it's mostly a problem for those who get stuck away from home.

 

Financial consequences will probably be huge. Airlines might go bankrupt, and some hotel chains report major troubles due to the lack of guests for an entire week.

 

Today they started to allow air travel in Norway again, but it will probably take a few more days before things get back to normal.

[Buffy]

For we clueless Americans, The Huffington Post has published this useful video pronunciation guide...

 

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it, :phones:

Buffy

[coldcreation]

I was on my way from JFK to BCN last Wednesday night over the Atlantic ocean shortly after passing Nova Scotia. As I looked up on the monitor just after dinner where they show the location and direction of the plane (intermixed with altitude, ground speed, outside temperature data).

 

There was a relatively sharp change in the course of the aircraft, something I've never seen before. Instead of the usual smooth geodesic, the path appeared broken, with a southern turn (like a bent nail).

 

Turns out that was about the same time as the volcano erupted (or just after). I think the west-bound jets were requested to fly further south to avoid the plum, pushing the east-bound jets further south still.

 

Anyway, we were flying into Spain so there wouldn't have been a problem at that time, or even the next day. But it was interesting. I wondered why, at the time, the captain had made such a correction.

 

 

Then yesterday my kid was playing with an American boy in the park. Turns out the old man is a Colonel with NATO in Brussels. They were scheduled to fly back last Friday and have been stranded here in Barcelona since. (I could think of worse places to be stranded, so I didn't feel sorry for them :D).

 

Meanwhile blue sky prevails down here. :phones:

 

 

CC

[Jay-qu]

But anyways, with silicate-free or nearly free ash, it is much less likely to cause engine problems, but the reason airliners were grounded is not necessarily that they knew that they couldn't fly, most likely nothing really bad would have happened, but, one, they didn't want to try, i mean knowing that there is a heightened possibility of engine failure, would you want to get on a plane?

 

Yeah, with ~25,000+ flights a day from Europe all you need is an increased chance of engine failure of .01% and a few flights are going to experience troubles..