On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 09:58:58AM -0400, P. J. Alling scripsit: > I've do a little research, and it appears that no matter what the > "Mail's" agenda, there was little enough reason for a blankett ban > air travel. Plenty of blame to go around.
Sure there is. The ash is not evenly distributed. The ash is not predictably distributed. There's, oh, one chance in a hundred thousand of an emergency and some lesser chance of a crash if an aircraft flies through the ash cloud, and because it's not a nice neat plume it's difficult to route around. (It could well be worse than that; there isn't a large body of statistical data on flying wide-body jet aircraft through ash plumes because on those few occasions when it has been done it has gone extremely wrong.) There's between 22 and 25 thousand air movements in the affected area of Western Europe every day. So one chance in 5 some flight has an emergency, every day. Four chances in five that you'll get one in a week. Do that for two weeks and the odds of a crash get peskily close to certain. Despite which, many of the flights wouldn't have been affected at all. It's just that the one that *did* get the total engine out and crash would have been correctly describable as completely predictable. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
