Europe: What the ash cloud can teach us

last updated 8 January 2015

The silence sure is lovely, said the U.K.’s Observer in an editorial. The skies over Europe, usually crisscrossed with jet trails, have been empty all week, thanks to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Planes could not fly through the plume of ash that drifted over the continent, and suddenly we were transported back in time, to an era before the Wright brothers. For the hundreds of thousands who are stranded, of course, “the seismic spectacle is nothing to celebrate.” But for the rest of us, the eruption provides an eye-opening reminder that we can’t control the planet “over which we have arrogantly seized stewardship.” Had this massive transportation disruption been the result of a terror attack or an industrial accident, “a dense cloud of rebuke and indignation would fill the ether.” But since we can’t blame the volcano, we can revel instead in “how liberating it is sometimes to be powerless before nature.”

Forgive me if I can’t rejoice in the demonstration of European incompetence, said Thorsten Knuf in Germany’s Berliner Zeitung. Faced with an unprecedented transportation disaster, Europe’s leaders simply threw up their hands. “Their crisis management was disastrous.” It took days before they even organized a conference call among transport ministers and airline officials. As planes sat on tarmacs and airports filled up with refugees, we heard nothing from the EU “except an order to the airlines to hand out free food and drinks.” Fortunately, the private sector has proved more resourceful than the government, said Antoine Latham in France’s Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace. Remember, it’s not only tourists who were stranded by the flight ban. “Businessmen, sales representatives, cardiac surgeons, mechanics, engineers”—all these people are suddenly unable to do their jobs. And in the cargo holds sit “medicines, spare parts, samples, vaccines, valuables, works of art, and fresh produce.” But European businesses have been quick to respond, rerouting supply lines or striking deals with local suppliers. We’ve learned that when a natural disaster strikes, we can adapt.

It wasn’t just nature that grounded all those planes, said Frank Schirrmacher in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It was also technology. “The invisible cloud completely paralyzing air traffic is not composed of ash and dust but of numbers crunched in a computer.” Flight simulations showed a theoretical risk that volcanic ash could turn to glass inside a jet engine and cause the engine to seize up. Once a simulation said that was possible, most countries’ safety regulations required closure of the airspace. This is a classic example of the idiocy of our “systematic handing over of power to computer models.” We treat the simulation as a fact, and it triggers a cascade of decisions that “leave no room for experience, intuition—in short: common sense.”