Flight into danger?

Is the near-total shutdown of air travel in Europe the latest over-reaction from those wacky scientists who brought you the Millenium Bug Meltdown and the Swine Flu Apocalypse, or are there real grounds for concern?

I vividly recall a rather older "disaster", a train derailment in Mississauga, Ontario in November 1979. (Article here and video report here). Briefly, a freight train carrying a variety of hazardous chemicals suffered a "hot box" and derailed late on a Saturday night at a crossing near Mavis Road in Mississauga, just west of Toronto. There was a huge fire. Over the next few days larger and larger areas of Mississauga were evacuated over fears that a tanker full of chlorine near the seat of the fire might explode. Eventually over 200,000 people were forced from their homes (three of them into our spare bedroom). The story was covered in lurid terms around the world: one Irish newspaper ran the headline "Toronto: doomed city".

When the fire service finally reached the tanker car in question, they discovered that the chlorine had all been blown sky-high by the initial explosion, remarkably (or not) without triggering the mass poisoning that had prompted the evacuation.

So exaggerated fears that ultimately turn out to be groundless, and official over-reaction leading to avoidable chaos, are nothing new. In the case of volcanic ash, there's really only one dire precedent that the doom-mongers can cite: the failure of all four engines on a BA 747 over Indonesia in June 1982. Thankfully, the pilot was able to restart the engines and land the aircraft safely; the same was also true in a much less severe incident involving a KLM aircraft over Alaska a few years later. Thing is, though, the BA flight had flown right through the ash plume of the volcano. It's not at all clear that this provides much guidance as to the risks of flying right now in the UK or mainland Europe, which are well over 1000 kilometres downwind of the eruption.

What's really going on here? I've seen suggestions in the North American press that there must be something much more severe than the volcano (implicitly, a terrorist threat) to have prompted such a drastic official response. This is pretty clearly ludicrous. It seems we are seeing no more than an exaggerated health-and-safety reaction, based on the almost certainly inappropriate precedent of the BA flight in Indonesia all those years ago. There's another factor too, one that often lurks in the background of safety issues: lawyers. The authorities simply don't want to take the chance of massive lawsuits if by some evil twist of fate they reopen airspace and a plane promptly runs into difficulties. The fact that the airlines themselves seem prepared to start flying again immediately implies strongly that they don't see any significant risk of that happening. Yet the uniformly benign results of the test flights undertaken by various carriers in the last couple of days seem to be have been simply ignored by the decision-makers.

There are suggestions that the present volcano may continue to erupt for many months, and fears that a much larger one nearby may be prompted into action. Unless we want paralysis in international travel to become a regular feature of our lives, someone is going to have to make a more realistic assessment of the risks.