As many people know, for the six days ending Tuesday this week, the UK along with much of Europe has been in a virtual travel “lock-down” when it comes to commercial turbine-engine air travel.

The instigation of this situation has been the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland last week whose plume of ash and debris was carried by the wind and jet stream straight over to Europe.

We humans are no match for one-two-punch of geology and meteorology, but how we respond to events such as these is entirely within our control.  It appears that the collective wisdom in Europe had no contingency planning for what to do in this sort of situation.  As a result, the air-space lock-down went on for days — many argue, now, it should not have lasted more than 48 hours, and, should never have resulted in a nearly system-wide blanket closure of air-space in most of Europe under any circumstances.

But even the lack of a plan for what to do isn’t the underlying cause, but merely a symptom of the root cause:

No defined standards, and, decision-making despite a lack of data.

As early as Saturday, 17 April, airlines were conducting their own flight tests with actual (but empty) passenger aircraft, and were returning information regarding the flight conditions in several places in Europe.  By Sunday, at least four major airlines had conducted their own flight tests and were beginning to compare data and report the same thing: There are many places where it is not safe to fly, but there are *more* places where it is safe to fly and we should work out a way to exploit these places.

What sort of data was prompting aviation and meteorological officials in Europe to keep the sky closed?

Weather RADAR data and satellite imagery.

Weather RADAR data and satellite imagery showed an ash cloud spreading over Europe.  On the face of things, this would prompt most rational thinkers to do what Europe did: progressively shut-down the airspace as the cloud made its way across Europe.  (Ash-laden air doesn’t make for good compressible, combustible materials in air-breathing engines, not to mention the damage it would cause in the works.)  However, since when did “on the face of things” ever really prove to be enough information?

There were two problems with using weather RADAR and satellite imagery both as a basis of determining the impact of the ash, and, as a source of data for making decisions:

1. It doesn’t give you an accurate sense of proportion or density, and
2. It can mislead you into seeing a more serious situation than exists.

What does weather RADAR look for?
Water.

How deep into an ash cloud can weather RADAR see?
Not far past the outer boundary.

What does ash look like on a weather RADAR?
A solid block of lead.

How much ash density does it take for weather RADAR to freak-out and “see” a massive block of solid ash?
Not much at all.

OK, so now we’ve established that using weather RADAR alone isn’t sufficient from which to be making decisions, let’s move our discussion to a simpler, but more pervasive gap in Europe’s air-traffic planning:

They had no established standards for how much ash in the air is enough ash to cause them to shut-down commercial aviation and bring businesses, commerce, and economies around the globe to a serious, sputtering stall, (not to neglect the stranding of hundreds of thousands of people all over the planet, including myself), and putting many plans, deals, and families into a tail-spin.

Even when European agencies did send aircraft to the air to test it, they didn’t know whether the data they brought back was telling them things were safe or unsafe.  They assumed “any ash is bad”.  It wasn’t until the airlines got together with engine and airframe manufacturers to look at the data collected by the airlines themselves and use the governments’ meteorological data to come up with “safe” standards for air-ash-density, that the collective governments (the last of whom were in the UK and Ireland) decided to lift the air ban in a dramatic change-of-position late on Tuesday evening (European time).

Let me summarize:

1. No standards.
2. Data collected but not meaningful.
3. Empirical data collected by equipment not intended for how it was being used and interpreted without true insight (literally).
4. Decisions being made anyway.

What I’ve skipped in this post is all discussion of contingency planning, continuity planning, and challenges with communicating across dozens of countries, laws, and decision-making structures.  Much of which were all gummed up throughout this mess for lack of thinking things through before the ash hit the turbo-fans.

The focus, here, however is on one crucial point, forget planning, because none of it would have mattered:

Europe was making decisions without data.

Are you?