Ash bureaucratic meltdown: an explanation
Do we really know why bureaucratic national administrations have closed down nearly the whole European air space because of a cloud of volcano ash?
Scientific explanations about the danger flying through volcano ash seem quiet clear:
Stewart John, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and former president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, explained that the ash can cause severe damage.
“This dust really is nasty stuff,” he told BBC News. “It’s extremely fine and if it gets into a jet engine, it blocks up all of the ventilation holes that bleed in cooling air.
“Jet engines operate at about 2,000C, and the metals can’t take that. The engine will just shut down.”
But how and why did European national bureaucrats decide to take such radical measures? Could it have been done differently? And could have there been other measures taken to avoid the subsequent chaos? These are all questions that come to my mind when I think of the inefficiencies of organisations that cost us billions (aggregated for the whole Europe), employed millions of people and claim to have the best experts working for them, i.e. national public administrations.
Among many other, I see mainly three big problems about how hierarchical bureaucratic organisations work, which have had a major impact on this unprecedented crisis: the paper method, the expert illusion and the hierarchical snowball.
