Small Eruption, Massive Fallout

Airlines protested the closure of airspace during
the volcanic eruption, but lack of consensus
on safe levels of ash left regulators feeling they
had little choice

In 1919, the US Army Air Service listed 27flying regulations. No. 12 stated, “If you see another machine near you, get out of its way.” Just over 90 years later, despite an array of sophisticated satellite measuring and tracking capabilities and reams of engine data, the only existing ICAO instruction relating to volcanic ash was essentially the same: “Avoid any level of ash contamination.”

Thus on April 15, Europe’s aviation regulators and air navigation services providers, faced with a menacing ash cloud from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, started to shut down airspace, resulting in the cancellation of more than 100,000 flights over the next week (smaller disruptions have continued). At the height of the crisis, almost 30% of worldwide scheduled passenger capacity was grounded and 313 airports closed, affecting 1.2 million passengers a day. The financial impact is estimated at $1.7 billion-$3 billion depending on what is being counted.

“The air transport sector in the EU has never previously faced a situation of such magnitude,” European Commission VP Responsible for Transport Siim Kallas stated. A big part of the financial impact, however, is of the EC’s own doing and relates to EU passenger rights regulations requiring airlines to compensate passengers for costs such as hotels and meals resulting from the cancellation of flights necessitated by the closure of airspace.

“Common sense would have said let’s suspend the application of the consumer legislation,” British Airways CEO Walsh argued. Speaking at the Phoenix International Aviation Symposium in May, Walsh lashed out at what he told ATWwas “bureaucracy gone mad.” He challenged the notion that skies were saturated with volcanic ash that posed a risk to aircraft. “There never was any ash; I’m convinced of it. There was just a computer model that said there was ash.” That computer model originally was designed to track nuclear fallout, according to the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Center, although it had been used successfully to manage a number of emergencies including the Kuwait oilfield fires during the first Gulf war and the 2005 oil refinery fire at Buncefield.

The repercussions and finger-pointing over governments’ handling of the crisis and the cost to airlines from the passenger rights bill will go on for months and possibly years. However, the air transport industry well may find that its own inability to reach consensus on engine tolerance to volcanic ash may be to blame. ICAO has been trying for some years to establish safe levels for ash contamination and the minutes of its 2008 Paris meeting showed an industry not yet united with the statement that “improved measurement techniques should allow progress with regard to the definition of the lower limit on safe ash concentrations.” As recently as a March 2009 workshop in Peru, IATA was forced to admit that despite strong efforts to get representation from the industry, no such presentation on ash tolerance had been possible.

Herbert Puempel, chief of the World Meteorological Organization’s aeronautical meteorology division, who sits on the ICAO group, told the UK’s Guardiannewspaper that the industry’s reluctance was “fully understandable. They have found it very difficult to come back with a single answer. If they have one number then it would be very low. The moment you set a limit then the lawyers will have a field day.” There was, nonetheless, a tacit agreement between engine manufacturers that powerplants could tolerate contamination of less than 10^-17g/m³but this has never been adopted nor was it considered advisable. On April 20, this was eased to 10^-16g/m³,which corresponds to 2e^-3g/m³or three orders of magnitude less “than the level of ash which analysis has judged to have resulted in the two multiple engine shutdown events,” according to a UK CAA paper.

IATA’s Fury

IATA DG and CEO Giovanni Bisignani sharply criticized European governments for what he called their slow response and ineffective decision-making, describing the situation as “an embarrassment” for Europe and branding the flight ban a “European mess.” He argued that the “industry’s calls for a Single European Sky for decades could have prevented some of the chaos” and urged a rethink of the decision-making process. While some of his criticism was valid, with everybody recognizing the need to develop more accurate models for estimating ash dispersal and impact, some of it was unjustified.

On Friday, April 16, two days after the initial eruption, at a point when most of European airspace was still open, Eurocontrol informed all its stakeholders about the potential for a longer-term ash cloud problem and started preparing for a different approach. The EC, EASA, Assn. of European Airlines, ANSPs, CAAs, mainframe and engine manufacturers, airlines, meteorologists and other involved parties worked through the weekend and on Monday Eurocontrol presented, via teleconference, a new model to its members. The draft paper took into account results of 32 verification flights; according to Eurocontrol Director-Cooperative Network Design Bo Redeborn, “none of them reported any contamination.”

An extraordinary meeting of EU Transport Ministers endorsed, also via teleconference, the proposed coordinated European approach the same day. EASA issued a Safety Information Bulletin with recommendations for flight in airspace with a low contamination of volcanic ash on April 28. The bulletin is not really a legal framework, Redeborn acknowledges, “but at least [it set] common rules of application on how to deal with it. While being under tremendous pressure, everybody agreed on new procedures to help open airspace. I think this is impressive,” he tells ATW,noting that the accord was accepted by ministers of all 27 EU nations and the mostly overlapping 38 members of Eurocontrol plus Estonia and Iceland. “We managed to conclude the initiative in a couple of hours. Without the volcano crisis it would have taken a two-year timeframe,” he admits.

“Hindsight, it’s all easy. We are all more knowledgeable now,” AEA Secretary General Ulrich Schulte-Strathaus reckons. He points out that Europe’s governments did apply, “as one would expect,” the relevant ICAO procedures, including contingency plans for the North Atlantic and Europe that consider, in particular, volcanic activities in Iceland and possible eruptions in Italy, the Canary Islands and Portugal (the Azores). “But the eruption of the Icelandic volcano is not an unprecedented event and the procedures applied in other parts of the world for volcanic eruptions do not appear to require the kind of restrictions that were imposed in Europe,” he tells this magazine. “For example, the [US] FAA has a world-established process of identifying clear no-fly zones. They deploy a minimalistic approach and allow operators to assess the risks to operate” (see sidebar).

For Schulte-Strathaus, “It is a working assumption that pilots have been trained to deal with manageable risks. Bird strikes are a risk, shear winds are a risk, but no one has ever [decided] to close airspace because of this.” Moreover, he continues, “never ever in the history of aviation has there been an accident as a result of volcanic ash in the skies. There are documented incidents, but there has been no loss of life because an aircraft flew though ash.”

Yes, But

Henry Gaudru, president of the European Vulcanological Society and scientific adviser to the UN International Strategy on Disaster Reduction, defended the airspace closure during a press conference in Geneva as “the only measure that could be taken” because there were “no reliable data on the exact concentration of ash in the atmosphere and when an aircraft can fly, or not, through such plumes.”

Concerns were fueled by ash encounters involving a Finnish Air Force F-18 and NATO F-16s. In a separate incident, a Thomas Cook 757 on a ferry flight was forced to return to Manchester owing to the loss of compressor bleed air from one engine. The crew said they sensed a smell of volcanic ash during the climb. And sending chills down the collective spines of politicians and regulators were the almost hourly radio and TV interviews across Europe with retired British Airways Capt. Eric Moody. The now-celebrity captain lost all four engines on his 747-200 after flying through volcanic ash at night over Indonesia en route to Perth in 1982. Against that color and backdrop and with the knowledge that there had been 90 encounters with volcanic ash over 30 years, regulators were understandably ultra-cautious.

One incident that illustrated the vagaries of the problem involved NASA’s DC-8 Super 72 powered by CFM56-2 engines. On Feb. 28, 2000, it flew through a volcanic ash cloud 200 nm. from where it was forecast to be. The extensive engine damage, costing $3.2 million to repair, was not discovered until a post-flight analysis. Made up of pulverized rock and glass, the ash can get into virtually every aircraft system and can paralyze the engines in minutes as it wears the blades and vanes in the HPC. The glass also melts in the combustion chamber’s 2,400-deg. C caldron and melds with moving parts.

Single European Sky

On April 19, Eurocontrol laid out a three-zone approach introducing some elements of the US model: A No-Fly Zone; a Caution or Red Zone comprising areas where some ash emissions may be present and flights are allowed under certain conditions; and an Ash Free Zone with flights allowed to operate without restriction. The charts indicating no-fly zones and red zones have been refined since, including the removal of the 60 nm ash “buffer zone” from the promulgated No-Fly Zone, thus reducing noticeably closed air space.

UK CAA which was the first to remove the BZ, always remained firm that implementation of the less restrictive US approach was a non-starter. “The advice, that aircraft encountering volcanic ash must ‘Avoid Avoid Avoid,’ and make sure there is absolutely no interaction between jet engines and ash, works well in the US, with its vast open spaces, where you can fly around any ash or re-route to alternative airports,” chairman Deirdre Hutton stated. “In the UK, with its congested, highly complex airspace, and a blanket of ash spread across the whole country, neither option was possible.”

An ANSP supported Hutton’s stance, telling this magazine that “it is inconceivable that this [US approach] would work for the corridor of continental Europe. Traffic is just too dense.” As a corollary, it would not work in the US either if the country’s airspace was managed by several dozen different ANSPs, as is the situation in Europe.

EASA strongly dismisses criticism that it was not adequately proactive during the crisis. In May, when a new wave of airspace closures hit Europe, AEA lost patience and asserted it was “high time that EASA offered technical assistance.” It called on the agency to “deliver further substantiating material for the decision-makers” because there is “still a lack of scientifically confirmed clarity about the ash concentration
levels at which safety becomes an issue.”

“We have been working very strongly with all parties involved to establish the appropriate measures so that aircraft remain airworthy in volcanic ash conditions,” EASA spokesperson Dominique Fouda tells ATW.“We played our role in accordance with our competence and we will continue to do so. We have outlined recommendations, but establishing firm definitions is a long process.”

In late April the EC offered wide-ranging proposals to provide relief to the air transport industry and structural measures to give “to the EU the appropriate tools to react to such events in the most effective way, to the benefit of the highest level of safety, and provide increased certainty for the air transport sector.” It asserted that revisions to “existing international procedures in case of volcanic activity” are “urgently needed” and said the EU will submit plans to ICAO in September. From its side, ICAO admitted that “more effort needs to be undertaken to establish a global safety risk framework for routinely determining safe levels of operation in airspace contaminated by volcanic ash.” 

At the May 5 extraordinary meeting in Brussels, the EC Transport Council endorsed most elements of the Commission’s proposed actions and agreed on the need to establish “binding limit values at EU level which clearly define the safety envelope of engines and aircraft as regards the risk of volcanic ash.” The 27 Transport Ministers also endorsed acceleration of the Single European Sky, with a number of key items to be fast-tracked. Kallas told media, “In particular, the appointment of a European ATM network manager before the end of 2010 is crucial. If the network management function had been designated prior to the crisis, the situation would have been quite different.”

At press time the EU had not yet appointed a network manager, but it is assumed Eurocontrol will take on this role. Until now, the SES focus has been “very much on [functional airspace blocks] and performance schemes. But FABs and performance schemes do not help if you have the airspace full of ash,” Redoborn acknowledges. “What has become obvious is that you need some authority to take decisions at network level. ”

The positive news, he notes, is that during the disruption, “there was no serious [safety] incident.” But he continues, “Could the disruption have been less severe if we would have had better preparations to address this issue? We all know the answer to that.”