The middle ground.
Apart from my brief foray into this forum for some humour (from which I quickly retreated as the mods weren't to keen), I have just been reading for a few days, hoping for a let up so that I can sort out the various positions of some family around the globe. (staff travel).
As I said before, I fly, I studied Geology at University, however I would not put myself in a position to say I am qualified to discern whether it is safe to fly.
As a passenger I have flown in proximity to erupting volcanoes. The visible plume was obviously avoided and despite the effect of the size of the plume I am sure we were avoiding at quite some distance.
I am aware the the damage a turbine could be subjected to if ingesting x amount of ash.
Nobody really knows what x is equal to though. Not a volcanologist, not a pilot, certainly not Nats, Eurocontrol nor the Met office, nor, I hazard a guess, the blokes who designed the Engine (apart from the carte blanche and slightly vague referrence about known ash clouds).
Since the initial days of the eruption even those lovely satellite images became fairly useless at detecting the presence of ash in the atmosphere, and so, the boffins relied on mathematical projections of where the ash should be.
Basically what I am getting at is we didn't know a whole bloody lot.
I am not usually astounded by PPRuNE contributors capacity for jumping down somebody's throat, but I am often astounded by sheer bloody arrogance. People on both sides of the line have been assuming a whole damn lot. That flying through UK airspace would have resulted in engine flame outs, or such significant damage as to warrant the engine being decommissioned. That there was absolutely no danger at all and the conservatives have paid Nats to do the incumbent some damage (or some such conspiracy).
The truth lies somewhere in between, and what has really bothered me throughout the whole thing, apart from not being able to pronounce the name of the Volcano, is how little seems to have been done to assess the situation until the Airlines turned around and said 'look this can't continue or we'll not exist next week'.
Anybody who argues their motives are wholly from a financial point of you are being naive. God knows they cannot afford to lose as much as they have done, but remaining grounded for a week would have a far smaller financial impact than losing all of your customers as your planes start calling Mayday all over the world.
I think the initial reaction to close the airspace was probably warranted given how little we knew, but the laissez faire approach that seems to have been taken to getting some hard evidence as to what measures were actually necessary long term is bizarre. And a couple of F18's from Finland and a Dornier somewhere over Grimsby don't cut it for me. Nor does mathematical modelling or guess work.
My two peneth and nothing more, feel free to rip it apart if you like.