Photos1 of 2RAF MILDENHALL, England – A French Mirage F1 fighter refuels off a 100th Air Refueling Wing KC-135 during Exercise BRILLIANT ARDENT April 14. The large scale NATO Response Force Air Live Exercise hosted by Germany began April 12 and will run through April 22. Participation by U.S. Air Forces in Europe units directly aligns with the command key mission areas of providing forces for global operations and building partnership. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Austin M. May)Download HiResUSAFE units participate in BRILLIANT ARDENT 2010Posted 4/14/2010 Updated 4/15/2010 by Master Sgt. Keith HouinUSAFE/PA4/14/2010 - RAMSTEIN, Germany -- The 22nd Fighter Squadron at Spangdhalem Air Base and 351st Air Refueling Squadron from RAF Mildenhall are partnering with air forces from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Turkey to participate in Exercise BRILLIANT ARDENT 10.The large scale NATO Response Force Air Live Exercise hosted by Germany began April 12 and will run through April 22. Participation by U.S. Air Forces in Europe units directly aligns with the command key mission areas of providing forces for global operations and building partnership.Sixty aircraft ranging from fighters, attack aircraft, helicopters, tanker and airborne early warning aircraft are operating from air bases located in Germany, the Czech Republic, France, Poland, and UK.In addition to air assets, tactical employment of Theater Missile Defense and Ground Based Air Defense assets will be extensively exercised. The aim of BAT 10 is to train, test, integrate and validate the interoperability, readiness and capabilities of NATO Response Force 15 nominated air forces and associated command structures by exercising NRF missions and tasks in a challenging and realistic scenario. The exercise is also open to "non NRF" air units from NATO, as well as Partnership for Peace nations, and provides an outstanding training opportunity. The exercise scenario is based around a United Nations mandated NATO-led Crisis Response Operation in a fictitious geo-political setting, a scenario specifically designed for this exercise.The NRF concept provides the Alliance with a robust capability to meet the challenging security environment of the 21st century by providing a highly trained and agile force, at high readiness, able to deploy at short notice wherever and whenever directed to do so by the North Atlantic Council. The NRF comprises deployable NATO Land, Maritime and Air Forces provided by Nations on a rotational basis. Training of the force is both essential and continual in order to maintain assigned forces at peak readiness. It is only through exercises such as BAT 10 that NRF forces can be operationally certified as trained, capable and ready to fulfill the NRF mission.

Photos 1 of 2 RAF MILDENHALL, England – A French Mirage F1 fighter refuels off a 100th Air Refueling Wing KC-135 during Exercise BRILLIANT ARDENT April 14. The large scale NATO Response Force Air Live Exercise hosted by Germany began April 12 and will run through April 22. Participation by U.S. Air Forces in Europe units directly aligns with the command key mission areas of providing forces for global operations and building partnership. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Austin M. May) Download HiRes USAFE units participate in BRILLIANT ARDENT 2010 Posted 4/14/2010   Updated 4/15/2010  by Master Sgt. Keith Houin USAFE/PA 4/14/2010 - RAMSTEIN, Germany -- The 22nd Fighter Squadron at Spangdhalem Air Base and 351st Air Refueling Squadron from RAF Mildenhall are partnering with air forces from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Turkey to participate in Exercise BRILLIANT ARDENT 10. The large scale NATO Response Force Air Live Exercise hosted by Germany began April 12 and will run through April 22. Participation by U.S. Air Forces in Europe units directly aligns with the command key mission areas of providing forces for global operations and building partnership. Sixty aircraft ranging from fighters, attack aircraft, helicopters, tanker and airborne early warning aircraft are operating from air bases located in Germany, the Czech Republic, France, Poland, and UK. In addition to air assets, tactical employment of Theater Missile Defense and Ground Based Air Defense assets will be extensively exercised.  The aim of BAT 10 is to train, test, integrate and validate the interoperability, readiness and capabilities of NATO Response Force 15 nominated air forces and associated command structures by exercising NRF missions and tasks in a challenging and realistic scenario.  The exercise is also open to "non NRF" air units from NATO, as well as Partnership for Peace nations, and provides an outstanding training opportunity. The exercise scenario is based around a United Nations mandated NATO-led Crisis Response Operation in a fictitious geo-political setting, a scenario specifically designed for this exercise. The NRF concept provides the Alliance with a robust capability to meet the challenging security environment of the 21st century by providing a highly trained and agile force, at high readiness, able to deploy at short notice wherever and whenever directed to do so by the North Atlantic Council.  The NRF comprises deployable NATO Land, Maritime and Air Forces provided by Nations on a rotational basis. Training of the force is both essential and continual in order to maintain assigned forces at peak readiness. It is only through exercises such as BAT 10 that NRF forces can be operationally certified as trained, capable and ready to fulfill the NRF mission.

Cowardly Europe - by Richard... Monday, April 19, 2010

Bruno Waterfield blogs on the wee timorous beasties in Brussels as they embrace the "precautionary principle" once again.

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Asleep on the job - by Richard...

The International Air Transport Association has sharply criticised European governments for their "lack of leadership" in handling the closures of the Continent's airspace.

This is relayed to us via The New York Times, which cites Giovanni Bisignani, IATA director general and chief executive. He says: "We are far enough into this crisis to express our dissatisfaction on how governments have managed it, with no risk assessment, no consultation and no leadership."

With a ministerial meeting taking place this morning in Brussels, Bisignani adds: "In the face of such dire economic consequences, it is incredible that Europe's transport ministers have taken five days to organize a first teleconference."

Laying into the region's decision-making process for closing airspace, he then said: "This not an acceptable system, particularly when the consequences for safety and the economy are so large," referring to the methodology, which is based on computer models.

Airlines have also formally complained that European governments are overreacting to the threat, relying on incomplete data from computer models rather than real-world safety tests in the air above Europe. In a blunt statement yesterday, representatives of Europe's airlines and airports called for "an immediate reassessment of the present restrictions."

The call was amplified further by Bisignani on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, who called the restrictions an "embarrassment". Picked up by The Daily Telegraph, we learn that he said: "This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess ... It took five days to organise a conference call with the ministers of transport. Europeans are still using a system that's based on a theoretical model, instead of taking a decision based on facts and risk assessment."

"This decision (to close airspace) has to be based on facts and supported by risk assessment. We need to replace this blanket approach with a practical approach," Bisignani concludes.

Once again, therefore, it looks as if ministers have been asleep on the job, letting the techies play with their computer models, without adequate supervision. But the real fault goes back to 2009 when the disastrously inadequate IACO contingency plan was agreed, lacking precisely the "risk assessment" that Bisignani is now calling for.

The reliance on this and the Met Office with its computer models has produced a mix far more toxic and damaging than any volcanic cloud, seemingly beyond the reach of ministers. As with global warming, and Foot & Mouth in 2001, they appear to be besotted with computer models, rejecting real-world experience for the allure of glitzy graphics and animations.

So far, it is estimated that the shut-down has cost the aviation industry some $2 billion, with further losses rippling through the wider economy. The time has come, methinks, for a bonfire of computers.

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Not our own masters - by Richard...

My article in the Mail on Sunday seems to have evoked a substantial number of hostile and some abusive comments.

Right now, though, my view that the complete closure of UK (and European) airspace might have been an over-reaction seems to be gaining some support, with reports such as this in theLos Angeles Times and Flight International, the latter talking of a "backlash".

It seems also that UK airline pilots arequestioning the ban, with their union BALPA seeking clarification on whether the UK air navigation service NATS and the country's meteorological office have consulted with other authorities experienced in ash-cloud analysis.

"Pilots will want to know on what basis the decision to re-open is being taken," says BALPA general secretary Jim McAuslan, adding that the union needs to understand the specific criteria involved and whether the safety assessment is founded on computer models or flight-testing. 

This is something of a loaded statement, as all the indications are that assessments are made primarily on the basis of computer models. They are run by the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, part of the Met Office – the very same that brought us computer modelled global warming.

The model used is called the NAME atmospheric dispersion model. This, and similar models, we are told, are well proven and are used to predict the spread of pollutants following a chemical or nuclear leak or even the spread of airborne diseases. Thus, this is a model initially devised for a different purpose, forecasting the spread of volcanic ash plumes.

What is interesting us that the FAA in the United States uses a different model, operated by NOAA, called HYSPLIT. But it also seems to be the case that reliance is also placed on actual airborne sampling, in making grounding decisions.

For the moment, though, the politicians are relying on Met Office advice, with Lord Adonis at pains to tell the media yesterday that its view was that it was still not safe to fly. But, with BA also having carried out a test flight and reporting no adverse effects, this stance is getting harder to sustain.

Thus, the situation is no longer being left to the bureaucrats and is entering the political domain, with even the Tories taking a view. Shadow Transport Secretary Theresa Villiers has issued an eight point plan to tackle the crisis.

EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas is feeling the pressure, declaring that the current situation of air travel chaos in Europe is "not sustainable", while British ministers are openly stating that EU ministers must review the rules.

And therein lie the clues that we are not entirely our own masters on this. The plan we are working to comes within the EU's "single sky" framework and is dictated by Eurocontrol, on the back of IACO guidelines.

This gives our prime minister very little flexibility, as he will have to defer to his European masters, rather than act unilaterally. Nevertheless, he is chairing a meeting of the emergency COBRA committee this morning, and may have some news to offer the hard-pressed aviation industry and its customers.

Having now moved to the top of the news agenda, the issue is displacing much of the election news, but may itself become an election issue – possibly to Mr Brown's advantage, who has the opportunity to grab the attention and the headlines, as he comes to the "rescue" once again.

But what neither he nor the Tories will point out that the very guidelines that have created this mess were brokered by the EU, under the aegis of Eurocontrol, and that we have very little room for manoeuvre. Clearly, a general election period is not the right time to trouble voters with such details.

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Booker blazes away - by Richard... Sunday, April 18, 2010

Struggling through the knee-deep ash, choking on the toxic fumes drifting in on the north-westerly wind, one staggered home this morning from the newsagent to the blessed relief of the tank of oxygen and the inhaler, then to address the intellectual fog to which the Booker devotes his column, addressing as he does the Oxburgh report.

Headed, "Climategate: a scandal that won't go away", he takes a somewhat different line from my post, where I suggested a more tactical line, capitalising on the weak criticism of the CRU offered by the egregious and thoroughly dishonest Lord.

No such subtlety troubles Booker though. He goes in full frontal, both barrels blazing, lobbing grenades with gay abandon on the way.

One of those "grenades" he so deftly lobs is the study carried out by Donna Laframboise who, with the help of 40 "citizen auditors" from 12 countries, checked out every one of the 18,531 scientific sources cited in the IPCC AR4. Nearly a third of them – 5,587 – were not peer-reviewed at all, but came from newspaper articles, student theses, even propaganda leaflets and press releases put out by green activists and lobby groups. 

More damaging, however, Booker asserts, was the report from a team led by Lord Oxburgh on the scientific integrity of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). 

Two sets of evidence, he reminds us, have been used more than anything else to drive the worldwide scare over global warming. One is a series of graphs showing how temperatures have suddenly shot up in recent decades to levels historically unprecedented. The other is the official record of global surface temperatures. For both of these, the CRU and the key group of top British and American scientists involved in those Climategate emails have been crucially responsible. 

Lord Oxburgh himself is linked to various commercial interests which make money from climate change, from wind farms to carbon trading. None of the panel he worked with on his report were climate "sceptics"; and one, Dr Kerry Emanuel, is an outspoken advocate of man-made global warming. 

Even so, it was surprising to see just how superficial their inquiry turned out to be, based on two brief visits to the CRU and on reading 11 scientific papers produced by the research unit in the past 24 years, chosen in consultation with the Royal Society (which is itself fanatical in promotion of warming orthodoxy). 

The crown jewels of the IPCC's case that the world faces catastrophic warming have been all those graphs based on tree rings which purport to show that temperatures have lately been soaring to levels never known before in history – thus eradicating all the evidence that the world was hotter than today during the Medieval Warm Period, long before any rise in CO2 levels. 

Best known of these graphs, of course, was Michael Mann's "hockey stick", comprehensively discredited by the expert Canadian statistician Stephen McIntyre and Professor Ross McKitrick. But the IPCC was able to defend its case with the aid of another set of "hockey sticks", based on different tree rings, produced by Mann’s close allies at the CRU. 

The most widely quoted of the Climategate emails was that from the CRU’s director, Philip Jones, saying that he had used "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline". If there was anything in the CRU's record which a proper inquiry should have addressed it was the story behind this email, because what it highlighted was the device used by the CRU to get round the fact that its tree-ring data hopelessly failed to show the result the warmist establishment wanted. 

When their Siberian tree rings showed temperatures in the late 20th century sharply dropping rather than rising, the "trick" used by Prof Jones and his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, copied from Mike Mann’s own "hockey stick", was simply to delete the downward curve shown by the tree rings, replacing them with late 20th-century temperature data to show the dramatic warming 
they wanted. 

The significance of this sleight of hand can scarcely be exaggerated says Booker – and he's right. 

Why, in using this misleading graph, did the IPCC not explain the trick that had been played by its leading scientists? If tree rings were so inadequate in reflecting 20th-century temperatures, why should they be relied on to reflect temperatures in earlier centuries? Why, when fresh Siberian tree ring data came to light, making a nonsense of the CRU's earlier temperature reconstructions, did the CRU simply ignore the new data? 

Anyone who has followed the meticulous analysis of this curious story by Steve McIntyre on his Climate Audit website might well conclude that we are looking here at a complete travesty of proper scientific procedure, matched only by the bizarre methods used by Mann himself to construct his original hockey stick. Yet these are the men, Mann, Jones and Briffa, who acted as the "lead authors" of the key chapters of the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports. 

They quite shamelessly promoted the rewriting of history produced by themselves and a small group of colleagues – the so-called Hockey Team – which the IPCC in turn used as its main evidence to convince the politicians that the world faces unprecedented warming. 

Yet scarcely a hint of this hugely important story is contained in the Oxburgh report, which simply glosses it over, hoping to appease critics by throwing in a few vaguely critical comments about how Jones and his team were a trifle "disorganised" in archiving their data. It ignores the utterly damning critiques of the CRU's methodology produced by McIntyre and McKitrick. It does not even begin to question the way the CRU has compiled its global temperature record, relied on by the IPCC as the most authoritative of all the official data sources for surface temperatures. 

Yet this in turn has given rise to all sorts of controversies, not least when Prof Jones last year admitted that much of his data had been "lost" (following his repeated refusals of applications to see it by McIntyre and others). 

More damaging still was the charge by senior Russian scientists that, in compiling its global record, CRU had cherry-picked the data supplied from Russia, suppressing that from most of the country while retaining the data from the vicinity of cities which, thanks to the "urban heat island" effect, showed a warming trend. So even the accuracy of CRU's temperature record has been called seriously in doubt, although one would never have guessed it from Oxburgh. 

As is reflected in so many political tragedies, from Macbeth to Watergate, it is often not the original dark act itself which leads to nemesis but the later attempts to "trammel up the consequence". 

Nothing will do more to reinforce suspicion of the CRU's conduct than the failure, first by those MPs, and now by the team led by Lord Oxburgh, to address properly the way in which it appears to have abused the principles of true science – a scandal which should be of concern not just to us here in Britain, who paid for it, but across the world.

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A virtual cloud - by Richard...

Air travel across much of Europe was paralyzed for a fourth day on Sunday by a huge cloud of volcanic ash, but Dutch and German test flights carried out without apparent damage seem to offer some hope of respite says Reuters.

Dutch airline KLM said overnight inspection of an airliner after a test flight showed no damage to engines or other parts from ash in the atmosphere. Lufthansa also reported problem-free test flights, while Italian and French carriers announced they would be flying empty airliners on Sunday to assess conditions.

KLM, acting on a European Union request, flew a Boeing 737-800 without passengers at the regular altitude of 10 km (6 miles) and up to the 13 km maximum on Saturday. Germany's Lufthansa said it flew 10 empty planes to Frankfurt from Munich at altitudes of up to 8 km.

"We have not found anything unusual and no irregularities, which indicates the atmosphere is clean and safe to fly," said a spokeswoman for KLM, which is part of Air France-KLM. German airline Air Berlin said it had also carried out test flights and expressed irritation at the shutdown of European air space.

"We are amazed that the results of the test flights done by Lufthansa and Air Berlin have not had any bearing on the decision-making of the air safety authorities," Chief Executive Joachim Hunold said. "The closure of the air space happened purely because of the data of a computer simulation at the Vulcanic Ash Advisory Center in London," he told the mass circulation Bild am Sonntagpaper.

So, the whole of the shutdown is based on a computer simulation that bears no relation to reality. Does that remind us of anything?

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Is it a scare? - by Richard...

As we gazed yesterday into the clear blue skies, we wonder whether the close-down of UK aviation is slightly OTT.

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