Originally Posted by
Gibon2
I'm not sure I buy KLM's excuse: presumably they chose the least expensive and inconvenient of several very expensive and inconvenient options,
Well err, yes..least inconvenient sounds reasonable to me...This won't have been a knee jerk reaction, I rather suspect the crew would have spoken to "Mission control" and talked and thought long and hard about this. Whatever they said I wonder if the options available when the destination closed was go back to "base", where there was a demonstrable capability to handle the horses, both from a health and admin point of view...or lob into Canada or the States at fairly short notice and risk subjecting horses/passengers to whatever procedures they would have put in place.
if the volcano problem had emerged a couple of hours later into the flight, they would have had to land somewhere in North America, horses be damned.
Correct - but it didn't, so they didn't, so the horses weren't..
FWIW this sort of thing happens - for example recently a Chile bound Air France flight (no horses on board but plenty of passengers) returned to it's point of departure, Paris, from well well out over the Atlantic when the destination closed due to civil unrest.