Haven't they learned anything?

Australia's flagship airline company, Qantas, has had two engine failures within just a couple of days. One Airbus A380 and one Boeing 747, both heading from Singapore to Sydney. With the A380's incident Qantas has cast doubt over the design of the engines.

It has been brought up, however, that there is a possibility of damage to the engines caused by volcanic ash. As you may have noticed, there's a catastrophic volcanic eruption going on in Indonesia where Mt. Merapi is erupting more forcefully than in a long, long time. Of course, the Indonesian officials have been a little bit too eager and quick to deny that the volcano had anything to do with the failures saying that the locations of the incidents are too far away from the volcano.

Well... Two incidents, in a very short period of time, in the same area, in the same flight route... The probability is just rising a bit too rapidly. And, please, just do this small exercise: draw a line from Sydney to Singapore on a map, or vice versa, and tag the location of Mt. Merapi on the same map. What do you see?

According to the latest measurements the (visible) main ash column and plume reach out as far as 350 km west from Mt. Merapi. Not terribly far, that is. But, what I think is more important, the column reaches upwards all the way as high as 16 kilometres, which is far beyond any cruising altitude of any passenger jets. And one thing that has been happily ignored is the fact that in different altitudes the winds blow in different directions. Thus, in the higher altitudes the ash may very well have been carried by the winds to the route of the Qantas jets.

And, as we learned from the Eyjafjöll eruption in Iceland, the winds are perfectly capable of carrying the ash very, very far away and in surprising directions.

This, of course, is speculation, but very plausible speculation. I'd like to see any atmospheric mappings of the ash distribution by altitude levels, similar to those provided in connection of the Eyjafjöll eruption last spring.

I just wonder why the Indonesian airspace hasn't been closed down. Haven't they really learned anything from the past?

Just two very good examples. The British Airways flight BA 009 from Kuala Lumpur to Perth in 1982 during the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Galunggung. The Boeing 747 suffered a total engine failure, all four engines, after flying into the (nearly invisible) ash cloud. And the KLM flight 867 in 1989, where a 747 flew into the ash cloud of the Mt. Redoubt volcano in Alaska and suffered a total four-engine failure.

Not to mention the planes that suffered damage to their engines during the early stages of the Icelandic eruption of this year, before they closed most of the European air space.

In my opinion, it's incredibly irresponsible to just wave off the possibility that these near-misses could have been caused by the volcanic ash of Mt. Merapi, spread all over to the atmosphere in the region of the Qantas' Singapore-Sydney route.