IATA Calls for New Approach to Dealing with Volcanic Eruptions

IATA Calls for New Approach to Dealing with Volcanic Eruptions

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that European air transport authorities dealt much better with managing traffic during the eruption of Iceland’s Grimsvötn volcano. At the same time, IATA said the absence of a formal agreement at the political level to respond to volcanic eruptions in a coordinated and harmonized manner leaves passengers and shippers vulnerable to fragmented decision-making.

IATA’s statement comes as Eurocontrol, the European aviation safety organization, said that ash from the current eruption should have little to no impact on European air traffic for the next 48 hours.

“Safety is always our top priority and without any compromise,” said Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s director general and CEO. “Work over the last year has put in place a European crisis coordination structure that is facilitating a much more effective management of this ash crisis at a working level.
But Grimsvotn is also a dramatic reminder of the disappointing lack of progress at the political level on the Single European Sky.”

Bisignani said the potential for a patchwork of inconsistent state decisions on airspace management still exists because there is a major disconnect between the improved process and state decisions on airspace availability. “The 2010 volcanic ash crisis resulted in unnecessary blanket airspace closures because European states took uncoordinated decisions based on a theoretical ash dispersion model with no empirical testing,” he said. “Over the last year the European Commission, working with European agencies, including Eurocontrol and airlines, developed a new approach which recommends that: states should not implement blanket closures of airspace and regulators should accept the capability of airlines to conduct their own safety risk assessments prior to flight in any ash affected area.”

Airline safety risk assessments augment the modeling of the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center with empirical data and are supported by airline safety management systems. The U.K., Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Norway are among the states that accept airline safety risk assessment procedures. IATA said it is working closely with the European Aviation Safety Agency to bring the remaining European states on board with this process, which has a proven track record in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In addition to his recommendation for a unified decision-making process on volcanic eruptions, Bisignani criticized the U.K. for not having test aircraft available for the current eruption. In a letter to Philip Hammond, U.K. Secretary of State for Transport, Bisignani wrote: “I am very concerned to learn that the CAA aircraft is unavailable. It is astonishing and unacceptable that Her Majesty’s Government cashes GBP 3.5 billon each year in Air Passenger Duty but is incapable of using a small portion of that revenue to purchase another Cessna to use as a back-up aircraft. I ask please that you ensure that all possible efforts are made to get the existing aircraft operational in the shortest possible time.” IATA estimates that the mismanagement of 2010 volcanic ash crisis cost airlines $1.8 billion in lost revenues and cost the global economy as a whole $5 billion.