Hello from a sunny San Francisco. I came out here for Chirp and was due to be flying back on Sunday to see my wife and children. I’m missing them. I clearly have a vested interest in returning home soon to see them, but you know, what I have a greater vested interest in is returning home safely. It’s a long game really that I don’t need to explain fully here but if you asked any father if they wanted to get home immediately and see family with some unknown risks or they wanted to get home sometime with known and manageable risks I’m pretty sure I know what the answer is. 

For me it’s all about science. I’m a scientist by training. Science is all about probability and testing. It’s wonderful in my opinion. It has checks and balances. You need to show the working that proves your hypothesis. You need to be sure you’re right as your career and your personal reputation depends on it. You need to perform experiments several times to show reproducibility. Often triplicate is the minimum requirement. Finally if you have some way of proving your hypothesis and assertion you write a paper and send it for review by your peers. Expert review. People in the same field often with the same or greater knowledge. People you don’t want to look stupid or wrong in front of. And they can question you and ask you to do more work if they feel that some of it is not substantial enough.

Obviously science sometimes goes wrong. Data is falsified, experiments do not back up assertions. Many times when science goes wrong its for the same reasons Marxism goes wrong; human greed and commercial interests. Scientists wanting that extra paper for tenure or grants or commercial entities funding clinical trials.

So how does this relate to the ash cloud and flying. Well at the moment I haven’t seen any scientific experiments so far. I’ve seen stunts. PR stunts and showy gestures and lobbying. Flying Willie Walsh for 160 minutes on a BA Jumbo does not scientific proof make. For starters we don’t know the flight path. Secondly 160 minutes is less than a transatlantic flight. Thirdly I want them to do it in triplicate. Finally how come they (the airline who desperately want to fly) get to be the ones to analyse the data and as far as I’m aware don’t publish it anywhere. All they do is issue a press release, phone a government or few and some EU commissioners and say it’s ok. Not good enough.

In the same article there is news about glass-like deposits being found in the engines of an allied F-16 and two Finnish F-18s which have sustained damage. 

“Allied F-16s were flying and they did find glass build-up,” one official told Reuters, without saying when the flight took place. “It was one plane. This is a very, very serious matter that in the not too distant future will start having real impact on military capabilities … if the volcanic ashes … issue doesn’t disappear.”

So airlines think it’s fine to transport lots of people, but the military think it’s very serious and will have a real impact on military capabilities. Hmm do the airlines possibly have a vested interest. Yes. Reuters talks about BA wanting compensation from the EU, the BBC carries a similar story. In that story Mr Walsh says:

“The analysis we have done so far, alongside that from other airlines’ trial flights, provides fresh evidence that the current blanket restrictions on airspace are unnecessary.

“We believe airlines are best positioned to assess all available information and determine what, if any, risk exists to aircraft, crew and passengers.”

I personally don’t agree that the airlines are best positioned, they desperately want flights to start so that their losses decrease and they’re now lobbying governments and making veiled threats about demanding compensation, which they know will be hard for governments already in fiscal bad times to bear. It’s a scare tactic from an industry which is a wounded animal hitting out at all who come near it.

What BA and other airlines are doing is pseudoscience. It’s a PR stunt and a sham and akin to Jennifer Anniston talking up “the science bit”. If you want to prove to me and others it’s safe to fly here’s what to do: 

Fly a normal transatlantic flight pattern three times (the reproducibility bit). Then have an independent assessor, some sort of government flight safety agency will do for me (I’d prefer that there was more than one assessor and that they declared conflicts of interests up front) to take your plane’s engines apart and do a deep test of them. Show the world your data. Show them flight plans and publish openly your findings. If any of the board want to fly on the plane then fine, but I don’t need them to. It doesn’t matter if they do or not as this is science and not PR.

If I today were to write a paper titled “The absence of increased risk to air safety related to flying through the cloud of volcanic ash produced by Eyjafjallajökul” and get it published in a learned journal I’d have to do more than just be important and just get in a plane for a couple of ours and emerge saying “it’s ok, our people have looked at it and it’s all fine”. Time for government to step up and look after the safety and well being of its citizens rather than the financial interests of a few. Trust in science a bit more, it has the facts and the process to prove things.