September 2010 Archives

 

 

Reykjavik aerodrome (BIRK) was originally a WW2 base built by the UK Royal Air Force, but there are records of aviation activity on the airfield site as far back as 1919. Iceland's earliest proper airport was at Akureyri in the north.

The picture above shows the old (now disused) RAF control tower. There is talk of it being refurbished, but economic times are hard in Iceland, and for the time being it is merely protected, in the sense that no-one is allowed to knock it down.

I went to Iceland this time for a conference on volcanic ash (see preceding blog). I stayed in the 1960s-architecture Icelandair Group's Lofleidir Hotel, itself beginning to look historically significant after nearly 50 years, which overlooks the airfield. The view below is from the stairs on the third floor.

I took a trip with other conference delegates in a Flugfelag Islands Dash 8-100 to see the volcanoes that produced the atmospheric ash which closed European airspace in April.

We took off from runway 01 and slowly turned left as we climbed, heading for the south coastal area.

The picture below shows us about to cross the approach to 13 a couple of thousand feet above it. 

Reykjavik, one of the world's increasingly rare truly downtown airports, is now only used for domestic flights and those to Greenland and the Faroes.  

Once it was Reykjavik's only airport, but now the recently vacated USAF base at Keflavik, about 50km away from the town across a flat, bleak, windy lava field, is Iceland's major international airport.

I like Reykjavik because it is a still staging post for general aviation deliveries across the Pond. It always has been. It has a feeling of history about it. In WW2 it staged deliveries of military aeroplanes to the allies, and was always a useful bolt hole for the big piston airliners on the more northerly Atlantic routes when they had technical problems, as they often did. Ernest K Gann territory.

The city snuggles up to the airfield boundary (seen from the Loftleidir hotel). The friendly harbour area is just over the rise. Beyond the hills, amazing wilderness, empty roads across moonscapes, and lonely beauty bathed in watery sunlight. 

 

Iceland's striking, geologically young landscape is evidence of the enormous energy beneath its fragile crust. A release of a tiny part of that energy severely disrupted airline services in Europe this year.

Volcanologists who gathered with air transport industry experts for a mid-September conference on Eyjafjallajökull and Aviation at the Keilir Aviation Academy, Keflavik spelled out the inescapable fact that Iceland is ready to blast plenty more ash into the North Atlantic's skies.

The day before the conference I joined other delegates on a chartered trip from Reykjavik aerodrome in a Flugfelag Islands Dash 8-100 to see Eyjafjallajökull and its more powerful neighbour Katla, and the surrounding seismically sculpted southern Icelandic terrain.

 

Looking across Reykjavik aerodrome toward the passenger terminal from the Loftleidir Hotel

 

Our transport to Eyjafjallajökull 

 It gradually became evident, as the conference progressed, that European air transport need not have been immobilised by the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruptions in April, because the knowledge of how to deal safely with the conditions existed at the time. The trouble was that the knowledge was in the wrong place.

 But even with the benefit of hindsight, the week-long disruption looks to have been inevitable under the circumstances, because Europe had not anticipated an ash event in any of its planning. For that reason none of the EU countries had, individually or collectively, availed themselves of the ash experience that the USA has built up through operating close to volcanic activity in Alaska. Meanwhile the world, at ICAO, had concluded that ash clouds could always be circumnavigated, so there was no guidance for what to do if circumnavigation was impossible, only some individual airline standard operating procedures.

Volcanologist Dr Haraldur Sigurdsson revealed that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption was minuscule on a historic scale, even in the past 100 years, and that much more powerful events were just a matter of time. So what will happen?

 

 

 Sigurdsson: more powerful eruptions are just a matter of time 

But as we flew by it in the Dash 8 on 14 September, Eyjafjallajökull was quiescent, its crater partly hidden beneath the shallow cloud.

 

 

Next to Eyjafjallajökull, however, stands Katla, also quiescent right now, but its covering glacier blackened by ash from its neighbour.

 

And a short distance to the south of these two, just offshore, lie the Vestmannaeyjar Islands, products of geologically "recent" activity and some of the youngest islands in the world. Heimaey, the largest, an inhabited island with its own aerodrome, suffered a major eruption in 1973 that forced a total evacuation of its people.

 

They have returned, but they know there will be a repeat. Precisely when and where the crust will crack is the unknown. The 1973 eruption took place in the foreground on the right of the picture.

Was the trip useful? Yes. When Eyjafjallajökull erupts again, or Katla, or maybe when the forces beneath Iceland produce a completely new volcanic fissure, I will be reporting on it with a sense of location, scale and geological context I could not have obtained any other way.

 

After the trip to Eyjafjallajökull

Was the conference useful? Emphatically yes. It positioned European, US and many other decisionmakers together in a relevant geographical context to share the vital knowledge that had not been shared before. So when it happens again they may make mistakes, but certainly not the same ones. Europe may be inconvenienced next time, but unless this is a Krakatoa-sized event, the continent is unlikely to be disrupted as it was in April. 

 

If there's one question about the BA 777 St Kitts short runway take-off I would like to have answered, it would be this: I know that there is a psychological tendency for pilots to see what they expect to see, but when the crew were arriving onto runway 07 from the south side, turning right to line up and looking left down the runway to ensure the approach was clear (it says so in the report), the skipper definitely noticed that the take-off run available looked short, but why had he not reacted to the sight of the massive amount of runway on his left that was not available to him?

It's this kind of mistake, when made by highly trained, perceptive people, that we need to understand more about if we are to become more self-aware and more able to take charge of our own human factors (=human weaknesses).

Discuss.