There are two skies up there overhead. There is one for the rich and another for the rest of us. The jet charter business has just had the week of its life. It assesses risk for itself and spent the Icelandic eruption finding ways round it. From the moment Europe’s transport ministers went collectively mad nearly two weeks ago when the eruption began, not a small jet was idle.
One Gulfstream pilot reportedly said: “The ash scare was the sickest joke in years.”
Another remarked that the entire first-class market simply transferred to small operators. While regulators flustered and haggled, executive jets were dodging the denser ash cloud, finding unregulated air corridors and congenial airports across continental Europe. Los Angeles has been awash in such enterprise, with a secondary market in seats from US$6,000 to US$20,000. Propeller planes could cross the Channel from more liberal France under the commercial flight paths.
While small planes are not big ones, risk appears to be a matter not of science but of wealth. Cheap and big is clumsy and slow. Ministers have admitted that they overreacted to the Iceland crisis. The UK Met Office’s volcano advice center in Exeter, southwest England, custodian of the computer models that closed British airspace two weeks ago, was not strictly in error. It gave “forecasts” to the Civil Aviation Authority which converted them into “science,” stirred in some 1980s engineering and passed them on to air traffic control. Each step was based, as a Brussels official admitted, “on mathematics not evidence.” No one flew up to test the cloud when the volcano erupted.
Whatever the risks of flying near this ash, they clearly failed the test of credibility, as one test flight after another showed. It does not take a vulcanologist to understand that ash clouds can be more or less dense depending on where they congregate. There are degrees of risk. Ministers seemed to understand this last Tuesday only after being beaten over the head with the blunt instrument of hundreds of thousands of stranded passengers and an ultimatum from British Airways.
The 90 jets throughout history that have encountered volcanic ash — surely enough to yield reliable science — had one thing in common. They all reportedly passed through dense ash concentrations and not one crashed. Hurricanes and electric storms must have killed thousands of air passengers over the years, but skies are not closed for the risk from them.
Lawyers may be smacking their lips over British Transport Secretary Lord Adonis’s brave admission of over caution. This could see the first significant class action against “hypersafe” regulation in history — and most significant it would be. The airlines claim to have been punished to the tune of £1.7 billion (US$2.6 billion) by the UK government’s mistake, but the secondary cost in lost business, ruined freight, insurance and general mayhem must be as high as that of bailing out a bank — another result of regulatory dysfunction.
A decision cannot be validated just because no planes crashed. Such absolutism is now casually used to justify any amount of over-regulation, such as the absurd measures taken against terrorism, swine flu and such menaces to the official peace of mind as from male teachers, swimming pools, scaffolding and stale food. So long as no one dies, ministers are comfortable.
Protest the cost and you are damned for “putting a price on human life,” which is what good risk assessors do all the time.
Once again we are torn between blaming scientists and blaming weak ministers, whose job is not to pass the buck to “my advice” but to consider it and then judge public risk. We elect ministers and pay public servants not to eliminate risk but to assess it. Safety can never be “absolute.” Road travel is the most dangerous thing most of us do. Were government to close every road that had no central divider, we would deride the overreaction. We oppose seat belts in buses for the same reason. Danger lurks in everything we eat, everyone we meet and wherever we travel. Were the government to ban unprocessed food, dating agencies and travel to Africa, we would think it mad.
The gulf in risk assessment is not between safety and danger but between familiarity and ignorance. From all we have heard last week, pilots with experience of volcanoes can handle the danger when informed of it. Most, if not all, regarded the blanket ban as ridiculous. The science offered absolutes rather than probabilities and those in charge panicked, with no thought of the cost of so doing. Once again, there must be a better way of handling science’s contribution to public policy, whether in the field of security or medicine or natural disasters. Recent ambiguous advice on drug classification showed how helpless policy could be when lacking a firm framework for risk assessment.
One problem is that British people are remarkably skeptical of the edicts of authority, and tolerant of any resulting mistakes and inconvenience — unlike the freer spirits in Europe and the US. At the very moment last Tuesday when meteorologists were reporting new eruptions and denser clouds, Britons watched alien vapor trails criss-crossing their clear skies as the rest of Europe’s airlines returned exasperated to work.
Everything in regulation is relative. Safety can never be complete. There is not a terrorist or a pedophile or an earthquake round every corner, whatever it may suit the Home Office budget to pretend. Whatever the lawyers say, accidents still happen. The horrendous cost that Osama bin Laden continues to impose on air travel is beyond all reason. I am sure if he could invent a sneeze bomber someone would demand sniffle tests at airports.
A feature of government risk assessment is that one risk fits all. Hence the crudeness of the blanket ban. If private jets could trust their pilots to fly round ash clouds, why not airlines? Like many modern professionals — teachers, doctors, care workers — commercial pilots rightly complain they are being stripped of a sense of personal responsibility and plunged into a Bermuda triangle of regulators, politicians and lawyers.
We should never leave any service entirely to the mercy of the private sector. We know from the history of shipping, drugs and cigarettes that profit is too powerful an inducement to cut corners. It has been reported that airlines were themselves partly to blame for resisting a more careful regime for flying near volcanoes, though that too was due to the related curse of negligence litigation, which no government has found a means of regulating.
Yet there is also risk in straying too far in the opposite direction. There is a known danger in hypersafety. Bureaucratic gigantism swamps risk management at the frontline, sweeping up the innocent and leaving terrorists running free. Many industries are now besieged by crippling regulations that defy common sense. The safety rules for tunneling have made new underground railways impossibly expensive. Anything to do with water, from river transport to lily ponds, seems to induce regulatory paranoia.
Playing safe in every area of public and private life has become a McCarthyism of terror. Industries grow fat on the surveillance state and exploit fear to grow fatter, pervading every corner of modern life. We have seen another instance this week, yet I feel no safer as a result.
The first Donald Trump term was a boon for Taiwan. The administration regularized the arms sales process and enhanced bilateral ties. Taipei will not be so fortunate the second time around. Given recent events, Taiwan must proceed with the assumption that it cannot count on the United States to defend it — diplomatically or militarily — during the next four years. Early indications suggested otherwise. The nomination of Marco Rubio as US Secretary of State and the appointment of Mike Waltz as the national security advisor, both of whom have expressed full-throated support for Taiwan in the past, raised hopes that
Whether in terms of market commonality or resource similarity, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co is the biggest competitor of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). The two companies have agreed to set up factories in the US and are also recipients of subsidies from the US CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law by former US president Joe Biden. However, changes in the market competitiveness of the two companies clearly reveal the context behind TSMC’s investments in the US. As US semiconductor giant Intel Corp has faced continuous delays developing its advanced processes, the world’s two major wafer foundries, TSMC and
There is nothing the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) could do to stop the tsunami-like mass recall campaign. KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) reportedly said the party does not exclude the option of conditionally proposing a no-confidence vote against the premier, which the party later denied. Did an “actuary” like Chu finally come around to thinking it should get tough with the ruling party? The KMT says the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is leading a minority government with only a 40 percent share of the vote. It has said that the DPP is out of touch with the electorate, has proposed a bloated
Authorities last week revoked the residency permit of a Chinese social media influencer surnamed Liu (劉), better known by her online channel name Yaya in Taiwan (亞亞在台灣), who has more than 440,000 followers online and is living in Taiwan with a marriage-based residency permit, for her “reunification by force” comments. She was asked to leave the country in 10 days. The National Immigration Agency (NIA) on Tuesday last week announced the decision, citing the influencer’s several controversial public comments, including saying that “China does not need any other reason to reunify Taiwan with force” and “why is it [China] hesitant
RSS