Aha - a 'hard decision'. Are you quite sure that shouldn't be 'tough'?
1985 - you are Gordon Brown.
Far from it, i hate the man. Can't stand what he stands for.
I just think that the UK government should have taken and still be taking a much more proactive role in this. They did nothing when the best data available was saying do something (i'm not saying wether the data was correct and good or sh1t and rubbish, either way there wasn't enough) and left NATS to take a 'hard/tough decision' to restrict the airspace that NATS is responsible for. Once that choice had been made by NATS (on the basis of overall safety) virtually every other western/northern european government followed suit and closed theirs, in many cases to ALL flights (which never happened in the UK). The government should have made that decision. The point of a goverment is to take all the available data, weigh it up against the needs of the country and and make a choice on what to do wether its unpopular or not, wether there's an election or not. NATS is there to, as so far as possible, guarantee safe passage of aircraft through the majority of controlled airspace of the UK. It shouldn't have been upto them, IMHO Brown and his lackeys ducked this one. And now that people are getting extremley pi$$ed off he will swoop in, do some bullsh1t deal with spain or where ever, declare the airspace open and say "look at me aren't i great in a crisis, i sorted it all out when that nasty NATS closed the airspace..." (if anyone else was PM i would be saying the samething).
Meetings will now be convened all over Europe amongst aviation authorities to decide the best way of agreeing a party line to allow a relaxation of restrictions without openly admitting the massive over-reaction in the first place
You might well be right, problem is that they had no way of knowing what would happen if they didn't take the action that they did. Think about the choice they faced. Loss of revenue for the airlines and other associated companies, maybe a few going bust versus the very real potential for an aircraft to have a total engine failure and not be able to land safely? Aircraft wins every time and i don't think that many would say otherwise.
If it was a total overreaction then it will be shown to be in the enquiry that will follow and lessons will be learnt.