LHC portal

Just had to share this in case anyone missed it Nicer to view...from a distance...

At distance large enough the only thing you can see is lack of airplanes on the sky.
I wonder, when St. Helen erupted, was all America without flying too?

I think that because of the type of eruption and lack of ice etc, and wind direction, that the situations are not readily comparable

My theory is that it's another example of global hysteria.
"If we let planes fly, there's chance some will have technical problems. If we don't let them fly, there will be no problems." That's some kind of trend nowadays.

It seems (from the news) that European and US regulations for air traffic near ash clouds are rather different. KLM (and now also some government people here in NL) say that EU regulations are far too strict and that the ban is unnecessary.

Can't really judge it though - if you see the pics of the engines of the Finnish military jets you'd think that perhaps it's better not to fly...

Apart from that, I find the eruption fascinating. There are some great pictures of it on the Web, as well as some cool time-lapse videos (from webcams, I believe). (Nice pic, mrgumby!)

Nice Pic mrgumby

There are very good reasons for the planes not to fly...

The real problem is they didn't perform real mesurements of the ash amount in the atmosphere across europe: they do only rely on a computer simulation... And so good the models could be, the real situation isn't necesseraly as predicted.

They did some test flights yesterday without problem.

Another solution would have been to let some planes fly lower above the ground (4000-5000m), as the ash cloud stays above 7000-8000m... This at least for inner-european flights...

If they didn't do measurements, they should do these measurements in the first place, then decide whether stop flights or not.
I am pretty sure there will more people die in cars because they can't fly than how much would die in eventually crashing planes - if any crashed. So this decision is effectively killing people.

for those who would like to actually pronounce the name of the island-mountain-glacier volcano:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2257

there are several clips of native speakers - flash embeds at the top, and if you scroll down a bit, links to the mp3 files. Lots of variations on IPA transcription, too.

Kasuha wrote:At distance large enough the only thing you can see is lack of airplanes on the sky.
I wonder, when St. Helen erupted, was all America without flying too?

Much of the US is less densly populated than Europe. The land (and airspace) down-wind of Mt St Helens isn't nearly so busy.

I don't know much about the background, but according to this it really is what I thought it is - decision driven by politics rather than knowledge.

http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2010-04-19.aspx

THese photos show glass buildup in a Finnish F-16 engine after flying through the ash cloud on Friday for a short time.

Yep. I feel obliged to point out that military design jet engines are more susceptible than the sort used in commercial jets due to lack of bypass ducts. Still not a pretty way for the engine to end up, and it won't take many journeys to take even a commercial engine out of commission that way. And you'll need a whole lot of luck to perform an in-air restart

I still believe both the decision and the responsibility should be left up to people actually doing it. If the engine needs a thorough check after each flight and eventual replace after shorter time than normally, flight companies sure they can decide if it's worth doing that or not.
Informing people that some conditions have changes and that they should proceed with caution is one thing. Completely forbidding them doing that in name of 'preemptive caution' is something different - it's like telling them they're too dumb to take responsibility for themselves.

It would be nice if companies (and individuals) always made decisions thinking about the greater good. Unfortunately the world is full of examples of what happens when you do not have strict safety standards enforced by law.
Companies are motivated by profit....regardless of what they might say, they are not there for the good of the customer.
Look at the air safety record in countries where the regulations are less stringent.
Companies will defer maintenance, fly in bad weather, use badly trained pilots etc etc etc, all in the name of better profit.
The Air companies that are complaining now are not complaining about passenger inconvenience, they are complaining about profit.
Yes...we do need a safety agency to tell us when it is safe. You can not trust the airlines and most people do not have the information to make an informed decision.