Danger in the air: volcanoes have a long reach

Science News, Sept 13, 2003 by Sid Perkins

On Dec. 15,1989, KLM flight 867 from Amsterdam was approaching its destination in Anchorage, Alaska, when the plane flew into what appeared to be a thin layer of normal clouds. Suddenly, according to flight-crew reports, it got very dark outside and the air in the cockpit filled with a brownish dust and the unmistakable smell of sulfur. One minute after beginning a high-power climb to escape the cloud, all four of the Boeing 747'S jet engines died when the combustion within them was extinguished. When the engines spun to a stop, the generators ceased making electrical power, leaving only battery-powered instruments functional. Airspeed sensors began to give false readings and then ceased to provide data. A cockpit warning light erroneously suggested there was a fire in one of the forward cargo bays.

Only after losing more than 3 kilometers of altitude did the pilots on the crippled jet get all engines restarted. Because the aircraft's front windows looked as if they'd been sandblasted, the flight crew could see what lay ahead only by leaning near the cabin walls and peering forward through the cockpit's side windows. The pilots landed the plane and its 231 passengers safely in Anchorage, but it took $80 million--including four new engines and a paint job--to restore the aircraft.

What could wreak such havoc?

Volcanic ash.

Flight 867's encounter with a volcanic plume was one of aviations most dramatic, but it's by no means unique. More than 90 aircraft have flown through ash clouds in the last couple of decades. None of those incidents has resulted in fatalities, but experts say that damages to the aircraft probably total at least $250 million.

The system now in place to warn airlines about ongoing volcanic eruptions and the locations and altitudes of the resulting ash plumes is valuable but not perfect, and scientists are working to make it better. They're improving techniques of interpreting satellite imagery, one of the cornerstones of the current warning system. They're also developing sensors that could form the heart of ground-based networks to monitor remote volcanoes or be mounted on an aircraft to scan for ash in its flight path.

LOOK OUT BELOW Of the 1,500 or so active volcanoes on Earth, around 600 have erupted in historical times. About 60 eruptions occur each year, several of which spew ash clouds up to altitudes where they threaten aircraft, says Ed Miller, a retired airline pilot now at the Air Line Pilots Association in Herndon, Va. On about 25 days per year, he notes, there's ash somewhere around the world at the altitudes where jets cruise.

Increasing the ash plumes' peril is their typically unthreatening appearance once they're blown downwind from a volcano. "The pilots [of KLM 867] said they flew into what appeared to be a regular cloud, and then everything went to hell," says Miller. That flight's encounter occurred almost 250 km away from Alaska's Redoubt volcano, which had begun erupting the day before.

Although the largest bits of ash fall to the ground in the vicinity of an erupting volcano, what stays aloft to waft further downwind is by no means benign. Even dust-size ash particles can sandblast windshields, infiltrate sensitive instruments, and clog engines.

Besides the particles of ash--which actually are minuscule fragments of shattered rock--volcanic plumes can contain high concentrations of water vapor, sulfur dioxide, and other noxious gases. Sulfur dioxide and water vapor react to form droplets of sulfuric acid, which over the long term can fade an aircraft's paint, etch the outside surface of its acrylic windows, and create sulfate deposits in engines.

"There's no known minimum quantity of airborne ash that won't do damage," says Leonard J. Salinas, a safety expert at United Airlines' headquarters in Chicago. "We must fly through clean air," he adds. United pilots are required to fly either upwind of a volcanic plume or at least 800 km downwind of the ash cloud's known edge. Otherwise, flights are delayed or canceled. Pilots for other U.S. airlines follow similar rules, Salinas notes.

Airlines get up-to-date information about volcanic eruptions and ash plumes from a network of nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers (VAACs) in various countries, where government-funded scientists track the altitudes and positions of ash clouds just as air-traffic controllers keep tabs on all the jets in their areas. VAAC personnel get their information from multiple sources: satellite imagery, volcano observatories, sightings by pilots, and even media reports. Once an eruption has begun, VAAC scientists issue advisories at least once every 6 hours until the ash cloud can't be detected.

SKY EYES Instruments on Earth-gazing spacecraft spy volcanic plumes in various ways. For instance, a satellite-mounted instrument called the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer measures the amount of radiation scattered by the atmosphere within six narrow bands of ultraviolet light, data that reveal not only ozone but also sulfur dioxide aerosols typically spewed by volcanoes and smokestacks. This technique sometimes isn't sufficient to detect volcanic plumes, however, because ash particles can fall out of or drift away from the plume containing the telltale aerosol droplets, says Miller.