It's apparent that a lot of people are very sceptical about whether the relatively thin dust cloud over the UK would bring down a plane.
You may be right, it may not bring down a plane. But you may be wrong. Who knows?
But consider this, if you had to make the decision whether or not to let the 500,000-600,000 people who's flights were disrupted today, get on board their aircraft and give it a go regardless, what would you do? Would you send your own family up there to try it out? I for one would not take that risk! The absolute number one priority of any airline and regulator is quite rightly safety.
Factor into it that airlines (mine included) would not want to risk causing any damage to their billions of pounds worth of equipment by flying it through that dust that can cause very real damage to an aircraft, even if it doesn't bring it down.
I say well done NATS for having the balls to make a difficult decision
