No option - by Richard... Monday, April 26, 2010

No option - by Richard... Monday, April 26, 2010

Jonathan Isaby, he of Tory Boy blog, has been warning against voting for UKIP. It (UKIP) "remains a hindrance which the Tories could do without".

By way of justification, Isaby tells us that both Labour and the Liberal Democrats broke their 2005 manifesto pledges for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and have happily voted to cede more powers to Brussels – on which basis we are told that, "anyone wanting to move away from European integration has no option but to vote Conservative."

And Mr Cameron did what with his pledge for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty?

GENERAL ELECTION THREAD

Print ready

What a horrible thought - by Richard...

"Cameron in naked bid to woo Lib Dem voters", headlines The Times. But I cannot imagine a more disgusting sight. The man looks repulsive enough fully clothed.

GENERAL ELECTION THREAD

Print ready

"Close to undetectable" - by Richard...

Although on forums and in comments sections, the "better safe than sorry" brigade still has a voice, the full extent of the over-reaction on the volcano ash debacle is now becoming apparent. 

From The Daily Telegraph (as a separate story in the print edition), today's Daily Mailand the Mirror, we learn that Jim McKenna, the CAA's head of airworthiness has admitted that the plume of ash during the recent shutdown had often been "close to undetectable".

Prof Stephen Mobbs, director of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, who was responsible for carrying out test flights, says that the highest levels detected above Britain were around 300 micrograms in "patches". But, said McKenna, "It's obvious that at the start of this crisis there was a lack of definitive data".

All the reports mention the absence of the BAe-146 in the early stages, as did The Sunday Timesyesterday, and it is by now evident that the lack of aviation assets to carry out physical sampling contributed significantly to the length and extent of the shut-down.

That said, with the help of readers, I have pretty much sorted the confusion over the Dornier 228 flights. It now seems pretty clear that it did fly on the evening of the 15 April, and again on the 16th, when it may have been in Scotland.

On the Friday evening, it was in Cranfield in Bedfordshire, through Saturday, being fitted with advanced Laser measuring equipment (LIDAR), but it is not clear (in my mind at least) whether if flew operationally on the Saturday.

The aircraft certainly flew on the Sunday, and it appears that the test flight in the BA 747 with Willie Wash on board was preceded by the Dornier – at least as far as Cardiff. The 747 went on over the Irish Sea to Ireland, while the Dornier turned right and flew to Prestwick. It then flew again on the Monday.

What is more than interesting is the early statement from FAAM issued on Friday 16 April, which stated categorically that the BAe-146 would not be flying to investigate the ash cloud - "primarily because the aircraft is currently on the ground with all instruments removed immediately prior to a repaint." There is also reference to the Dornier being "highly capable".

Clearly though, it was not capable enough and, even with the best will in the world, the aircraft cannot be in two places at once. For a slow-flying turbo-prop with a limited ceiling, characterising the whole extent of the ash cloud, which at times was claimed to be covering the whole of the UK, was an impossible job. 

Thus, at some time, the decision must have been made to reactivate the BAe-146. It cannot be stressed enough what an extraordinary decision that was. With the aircraft already stripped down, it must have required a massive – and expensive – effort to get it back flying so soon. This suggests an element of panic, and in high places. Authorisation for that spend and the allocation of the resources needed could not have come from line managers.

Alongside this was the argument about ash tolerances, but this seems more and more to be a red herring, an alibi to justify the prolonged closure and to cover up the lack of data. If the cloud was "undetectable" in some areas, then it was manifestly safe to fly. This, we will have to explore in another post.

Whatever else, though, this debacle must not be allowed to fade away without a commitment to the fullest possible (and public) inquiry. There are huge issues involved here, not least the competence of quango queen Deirdre Hutton and the senior staff of the CAA. If the Tories had any political sense (joke), they would already be demanding such an inquiry. But then, as we have learned to our cost, the Tories rarely indulge in real politics.

ICELAND'S REVENGE THREAD

Print ready

Damned if we do ... - by Richard...

A fascinating piece in The Washington Post is headed, "Indo-Pakistan proxy war heats up in Afghanistan."

"Across Afghanistan," we are told, "behind the obvious battles fought for this country's soul, a shadow war is being quietly waged. It's being fought with spies and proxies, with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money and ominous diplomatic threats."

The piece continues: "The fight pits nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan against one another in a battle for influence that will almost certainly gain traction as the clock ticks down toward America's military withdrawal, which President Barack Obama has announced will begin next year."

Sadly, I was writing this in October last year and, more recently here, here and here. And, as the WaPo is beginning to recognise, this is the dominant dynamic in the war in Afghanistan.

But, as it stands, resolving the Indo-Pakistani conflict is not politically possible – not least because none of the Western nations are prepared to invest the political capital and, specifically, because no one is prepared to confront India. Thus, it is head-in-the-sand time, leaving a gaping wound to fester.

Resolving this issue will not, in itself, resolve the Afghan conflict but, without a resolution, the conflict cannot be ended. All the rest is detail, underpinning yet again the simple, unvarnished truth – we cannot prevail. Yet, politically, it is hard to see how we can engineer a rapid departure.

Furthermore, should the coalition forces depart, the proxy war might just become overt confrontation, putting those two nuclear powers at odds with each other. And the other side of Afghanistan is Iran - also supported by India – a country with nuclear ambitions. If that situation is mishandled (more than it is at the moment), we could be seeing a lot of mushrooms in the region, and I don't mean fungi.

From our stance, it appears that we have started something we don't know how to end and, even if we did, we do not have the wherewithal to achieve it. We are thus damned if we withdraw, and damned if we do not. The only consolation, I suppose, is that if the whole thing does go belly up, global warming will seem a very minor problem.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

One of our Dorniers is missing - by Richard... Sunday, April 25, 2010

In her own words she condemned herself. Writing in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday (online), Deirdre Hutton, chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) sought to defend her authority's decisions and claims that, "it led the way in getting airlines flying again."

But, in the very text to which she lent her name, she set out the procedures needed before aircraft could resume flying. "First," she wrote, "we had to understand the extent of ash contamination, by sending up planes bearing instruments that could measure its density (complementing the data provided by ground-based lasers)."

There is the endorsement of the very point which we have been making – that specialist aircraft were needed to investigate the ash cloud extent and bring back physical data to update and refine the Met Office's computer model. And, as we have already ascertained, there were only two such aircraft available in the whole of the UK.

The first and most suitable aircraft, the BAE-146 operated by the Facility of Airborne Atmospheric Measurement (FAAM), was in its hanger in Cranfield, stripped-down preparatory for repainting. When the balloon when up, it must have taken superhuman effort to get it reassembled and in flying condition, and every short-cut in the book must have been taken.

That left the very much smaller, German registered turbo-prop Dornier 228, operated by the Airborne Research and Survey Facility (ARSF), out of Gloucester airport. With limited range and performance, it is also unpressurised which gives it an effective ceiling of 20,000 feet, too low for it to reach the higher levels of the ash cloud, much less get above them to make vital measurements.


Nevertheless, something is better than nothing – although not much better – and evidently conscious of the need to get something into the air, we were told in a press release by the funding agency, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) that the aircraft was being readied for a flight on the evening of Thursday 15 April, the day the no-fly zone had been imposed.

Therein lies a mystery which, when the details of the events come fully to be explored – if they ever are – may give a clue to the disarray within the authorities which were charged with managing the situation. The mystery intensifies because the Met Office in its most recent briefing affirms that the Dornier flew on the Thursday evening, claiming that the flight "provided inconclusive evidence on the extent of the ash cloud."

It also claims that the aircraft flew on 16 April, when it is said to have detected three distinct layers of ash, thus claiming that its models were "also evaluated with observations, including the Met Office and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) aircraft".

Why this is a mystery is simply to explain, borne out by a second press release from NERC, which states that the first flight was from Cranfield airfield at 14:00 UK time on Sunday 18 April. After take off, the Dornier flew south via London, Southampton and Cardiff, and then north to Prestwick before returning to Cranfield. 

The second flight took off from Cranfield at 11:30 UK time on Monday 19 April. During this flight, the aircraft flew to Gloucester up to an altitude of 2,000 feet. It then turned north and flew at varying altitudes up to 20,000 feet towards Prestwick along the west coast, and across the Midland Valley before turning to fly down the east coast and across the Wash back to Cranfield. 

Results from both flights, we are told, revealed the presence of sulphur dioxide and a number of layers of volcanic ash of varying sizes between ground level and 20,000 feet. "These discreet layers of fine material are particularly difficult to spot with the naked eye," we were also told, indicating that the levels of ash must have been very low.

Therein lies the mystery. Why did NERC claim that the aircraft was going to fly on 15 April, when in fact it did not fly until the 18 April, and why did the Met Office not only claim the aircraft had flown on the 15th but the day after, thus claiming that its model had been validated? 

This gets even more bizarre when the Met Office's own website refers to flights on the Sunday and Monday (although referring to "earlier flights"), further complicating the issue by attributing one flight to the BAE-146, which first flew only on the Tuesday.

As to the whereabouts of the Dornier, the ARSF website tells us that the aircraft was scheduled to deploy to Antigua on 1 March to a base to support a survey of Monserrat, returning on 21 March. It was then to spend its time on "early season projects", covering research projects being conducted on Salisbury Plain, in Wales, Northumbria and Cumbria.

Why then was it not available on 15 April to carry out ash plume sampling, and why did the aircraft not fly until the 18th? And why, incidentally, was it then operating out of Cranfield, when its home base is in Gloucester? Limited though the aircraft is, its input in those early days could have been critical but, during that time, one of our Dorniers (our only one) was missing.

ICELAND'S REVENGE THREAD

Print ready

The "ash" crisis continued - by Richard...

Regular readers may have surmised, from the relatively light blogging last week, that I have been otherwise engaged. And indeed I have, working flat out on the "ash crisis" for the Mail on Sunday. The piece I originally wrote was for the features desk, but was snaffled by "news" and appears in heavily truncated form here (spool halfway down).

What I have done, therefore, is publish below the original, early version of the piece as submitted and worked on by my editor, the seriously impressive Laura Collins. Even then, there are updates to this piece, but rather than mess around with it, I'm putting it up, "as is" and will then write another post, updating it and exploring some of the issues arising, and other developments. So here goes:

At 11o'clock last Tuesday morning a flight took off from a small Bedfordshire airfield and climbed into the empty skies above Britain. It flew up the country's east coast, several times - each a clear, level run. It landed at Prestwick at half past one, refuelled and repeated the exercise this time flying back down the west coast.

Aboard were Met Office and Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurement (FAAM) scientists, tracking and measuring volcanic ash density through aerosol layer. They studied the engine on landing, stripping it back and testing. Shortly after the blanket flight ban that had paralysed the air industry since the eruption of Eyafjallajokull two weeks ago, was lifted.

By the time that announcement was made 22 British Airways flights were already entering the 'no-fly zone.' Thousands of miles away and many hours earlier they had set off 'confident' that their planes would be able to land at Heathrow and Gatwick.

It was a bold move but it wasn't a gamble. They had sent up their own test flight two days earlier. They had measured the density of the volcanic ash at cruising altitude. They had examined the engines and conducted borescope inspections.

They had established the facts. They had data - which, The Mail on Sunday has discovered, is more than the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had when it issued the blanket ban six days earlier.

But then BA - along with Lufthansa, Air Berlin and Finn Air, all of which sent up test flights - had at their disposal something absolutely vital that the CAA and the Met Office did not: planes.

Hard to believe, but the fate of our aviation industry last week hung on just one aircraft, a BAE 146. It is the only plane in the London Volcano Ash Advisory Unit's armoury capable of sampling air at the necessary. And until Tuesday it was grounded, stripped of its instruments, undergoing a paint job.

While technicians worked round the clock to reassemble the aircraft the government was forced to rely on a much smaller, German registered turbo-prop aircraft, a Dornier 228. With its limited range and performance it plodded through the skies unable to deliver key data. Even then, it was only to fly on Sunday 18 April, four days after the ban had been imposed. Academics thus had to base conclusions on theoretical models, insufficiently bulked out with data gleaned from flights.

Lifting the ban last week National Air Traffic Service (NATS) admitted that: 'The information about how aero engines could cope with adverse ash conditions only became available yesterday.' ie Tuesday. It was no coincidence that the BAE 146 had finally got off the ground. Nothing could illustrate more clearly that, while the disaster was natural the mishandling was entirely man-made. And the decisions that led to this costly shambles actually go back years.

We have looked into the protocol followed, the agencies involved and the resources at their disposal and it is hard not to conclude that it wasn't volcanic ash that threatened to bring the air industry to its knees but decades of neglect, underfunding, poor planning and layers of bureaucracy that underpin the government and Europe-wide response to it.

This, despite the fact that the ink had barely dried on a contingency plan drawn up by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in September 2009.

So what went wrong and why?

Starting with the events last Thursday, as the cloud of ash from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano was creeping towards the UK the first people in the hot seat were not the air traffic controllers but a team of eight scientists working for the Met Office in an obscure office called the London Volcano Advisory Centre (LVAA).

These specialists don't spend all their time working on volcanic ash mapping and forecasting but are called in on an emergency basis. Their job was to provide the aviation industry with forecasts on the spread of the ash and to warn pilots of where it was unsafe to fly.

Their tool in this instance was a computer model called NAME and, as they ran their simulations, it became clear that first the northern part and then the whole of the UK was going to be covered by the ash cloud. Closing down airspace, or even advising it, was not in the job description. The LVAAC could only pass its forecasts onto the National Air Traffic Services (NATS).

In the early stages of a volcano eruption there is very little hard data available. Models have a good track record of predicting ash dispersion. Nevertheless it was at this very early stage that things started to go wrong. For while computer models have good short-term accuracy with time and distance, uncertainties and modelling errors build up and they get less and less reliable.

Furthermore these models cannot provide the all-important detail of particle density - how many dust particles there are in the air - which has a direct bearing on whether it is safe to fly. To an extent, satellites can fill in some of the gaps and there is ground-based measuring equipment which can also be used to measure particle density but the equipment is thinly scattered and the results unreliable. To get the detail required teams have to fly up into the path of the dust in specially equipped aircraft and collect physical evidence.

And here what happened and what the ICAO recommended start to diverge for reasons we shall address. The ICAO recommends three clear phases of response: Alerting Phase, Reactive Phase and Proactive Phase. Nowhere does the ICAO suggest closing airspace completely - rather it talks of rerouting flights and taking a pragmatic approach based on continued measurement of the ash present in the air.

And therein lies the problem. The information needed to make a true judgement was not available because the aircraft were not available. Unable to establish what was a safe threshold for ash particles in the atmosphere and unable to navigate through the variety of manufacturers' own design parameters the 'easy' option was to put it at zero.

During and after the Second World War the RAF had a large fleet of aircraft which could be used to sample volcanic dust, but this was progressively whittled down until 1964 when the last meteorological flight was disbanded by the Macmillan government.

The UK capability, however, remained high, as a number of V-Bombers had been adapted for air sampling, mainly to measure nuclear fallout in the case of war. But as these were progressively retired the capability was not replaced.

That left a small RAF-operated meteorological research flight which by 1980 comprised just two aircraft - a converted Canberra jet bomber and a highly equipped C-130 Hercules transport, nicknamed by its crew, 'Snoopy.' Under the Thatcher defence cuts two became one - the single Hercules which survived until 2001 when, to reduce costs, Blair's Labour government sold off Snoopy, ending military involvement in operating meteorological aircraft.

After a gap of four years a single BAE-146 was acquired, primarily as a research aircraft for civilian projects, to be used anywhere in the world. And so it was that the fate of so much rested on this solitary plane. It is hard to square this reality with CAA Chief Executive Andrew Haines's assertion that Britain had 'led the way,' in establishing the new safety threshhold for the volume of ash particles in the atmosphere that led to the ban being lifted. Arguably the safety threshold announced on Tuesday was not new it was merely the first one properly established.

Across the rest of Europe things were not much better. Theoretically a fleet of 24 aircraft was available, including the British pair, but not all were suitable. One in fact was a microlight. Only five fast jet of the type needed were actually on the atmospheric research agencies' inventory.

Because until two weeks ago Volcanic Ash was not nearly such a hot topic as, say, Climate Change. Money has been thrown at climate change research and monitoring - the British Met Office has received over £200million for that purpose - while other meteorological services have been starved of funds. The LVAAC depends on Eurocontrol enroute charges for its funds - a sort of toll paid by the airlines that fly through its space. That is clearly not enough.

The blanket ban was, then, governed as much by what we did not know as what we did. And while there is no European law governing just what to do in the event of a volcanic eruption affecting the skies in this way we are bound to our fellow European states by historic treaties which prevent us from being able to close our skies unilaterally and make the prospect of opening them unilaterally problematic. 

But with shared responsibility comes no real responsibility - or accountability. As dissatisfaction over the past few days grows the European Commission has claimed it occupied only a 'side-line' observational role in all of this. This is misleading. The contingency plans may have started with the United Nations body of the ICAO but they were agreed upon by a galaxy of authorities including the European Union, the EU aviation control agency, Eurocontrol, the British government and all the other EU member state governments plus their safety agencies.

According to International Air Transport Association (IATA) Director General and CEO, Giovanni Bisignani, the crisis management was characterised by, 'no risk assessment, no consultation, no organisation and no leadership. Governments have not taken their responsibility to make clear decisions based on facts.'

If we are to learn anything from this fiasco guilt must now be shouldered where appropriate and an honest reassessment of priorities made. The ICAO likens the volcano watch service to an airfield fire service. You hope you'll never have to use it, but it should be well equipped and its people well trained, just in case.

Instead, as we have discovered, successive governments have sold off our 'fire engines.' The plethora of agencies involved are doing their best to throw up a smokescreen that rivals Eyjafjallajokull, but the truth is that what we have witnessed over the past two weeks and what kept planes out of the sky for so long was not volcanic ash but generations of neglect.

ICELAND'S REVENGE THREAD

Print ready

The story's out - by Richard...

While the girls and boys have been playing their games, others have been doing some serious work, charting the debacle of the closure of UK and European airspace for six days, in response to the Eyafjallajokull volcano.

As far as I am aware, there will be three newspapers today covering the events which led to the debacle (there may be more) but first out of the trap is Booker. He frames the story perfectly, pointing out that the closure of our airspace "casts a highly disturbing light on the way we are governed."

Before going any further, it is necessary to emphasise this point. The bottom line here is governance. Whatever the technical issues, the fact – and I do say fact – that British airspace was needlessly closed, at great cost and causing great distress, was down to a failure of government. This is the stuff of real politics, affecting real people and costing real money.

That said, such are the complexities of the events – those during the crisis and the years preceding it – that there is scope for emphasising different aspects of them, Booker choose to focus on the "striking parallels" with the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001.

Both episodes, he writes, involved a massive system failure in a complex new structure of supranational governance which was being put to the test for the first time, Both were made much worse by over-reliance on an inadequate computer model, which ended up causing unnecessary chaos and misery for hundreds of thousands of people and costing not millions but billions of pounds.

What turned a drama into a crisis was the central flaw in the international system for responding to such incidents, whereby the authorities were locked by international rules into a rigid bureaucratic system. Based on a computer model, which gave them no alternative but to close down air traffic for days longer than was justified. 

But, writes Booker, the real flaw in the system was that it made no provision for testing that crude computer model against actual real-life data, which could have shown that the computer was vastly exaggerating the risk.

Responsibility for responding to the Icelandic eruption lay with a bewildering hierarchy of national and international authorities, starting at the top with a UN body, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), working down through the European Commission and Eurocontrol (which is not part of the EU), to national agencies, such as our own Civil Aviation Authority, the National Air Traffic Service and, last but not least, the UK Met Office, owners of the relevant computer model.

Under guidelines issued by the ICAO last September, as soon as the Met Office's computer simulation of air flows around Europe indicates that a particular wind-borne dust cloud might theoretically be a danger, it automatically triggers an exclusion zone for air traffic. What the computer cannot show is the density of the dust, and whether it thus poses a genuine hazard.

A properly designed system should have allowed for immediate sampling and monitoring of the ash cloud to see whether it was at the danger level. As a spokesman for the International Advisory Committee on Flight Safety put it, "military and transport aircraft should have been sent straight up to determine the nature of the ash cloud. The density and the make-up of the cloud is what matters, and that information has just not been available."

Somehow the need for this had been completely overlooked by all the international officials involved in devising the new system (which was endorsed on our behalf by the European Commission). Because no one had been made officially responsible for carrying out the relevant sampling, it then turned out that there were very few aircraft left in Europe specially equipped to do it.

Booker thus picks up on the point made earlier on this blog, whence he notes the similarity with 2001, when our government tried to tackle the foot-and-mouth epidemic within a new straitjacket of EU directives. 

Instead of listening to those world experts who were urging it to contain the disease by vaccination, it handed over direction of the crisis to a computer modelling team with no experience of animal diseases, who came up with that truly disastrous policy of a "pre-emptive cull". The result was that millions of healthy animals were killed unnecessarily, the appalling damage inflicted on Britain's countryside was infinitely worse than it should have been, and the cost rose into billions.

It is especially ironic, Booker concluded, that a Met Office computer model was at the centre of this latest fiasco, and that, thanks to successive government cuts over the years, it no longer has any aircraft capable of testing whether its model's data are reliable.

Over the past 20 years, our Met Office has received some £250 million to allow its computer models to predict future climate change. If just a tiny fraction of that money had been spent on aircraft of the type that the Met Office used to have at its disposal to sample dust clouds, airlines and their customers might have been saved several times the sum the Met Office has frittered away on its obsession with global warming.

ICELAND'S REVENGE THREAD

Print ready

Constitutional ignorance - by Richard... Saturday, April 24, 2010

Unelected prime ministers would be forced to hold a general election within six months of taking office, under proposals being announced by David Cameron today, or so says The Independent.

Given the lamentable lack of education in this country, I can quite understand that many people fall for this trap, but one would expect a putative prime minister to know better. As my colleague has said so many times, we do not elect prime ministers in this country. They are appointed by the Queen, after being selected by the majority party.

In the increasingly unlikely event that Cameron becomes prime minister, he will not have been elected to that post. He will have been elected MP for Witney, becoming prime minister because the foolish Conservatives have selected him as their leader.

And if you think about it, the utter stupidity of the premise becomes obvious. The only people given a chance to vote for Cameron are the electors of Witney. Why should they, and only they, be allowed to elect the prime minister?

Mind you, with this man and much of the nation being ignorant of our constitution, it is no wonder their poor little brains can't get to grips with the complexities of the EU. They don't even understand their own system.

Video via Witterings from Witney - who says "we're doomed".

GENERAL ELECTION THREAD