Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the airspace restrictions, I remain very puzzled by the legal process which appears to be operating in the UK and, for that matter, Europe.
NATS is a privately-owned ATM service provider. It is regulated by the CAA to ensure that it operates safely, in accordance with UK legislation etc etc.
NATS is not itself a regulator, and has no powers or indeed expertise to regulate. We can all laugh at a pig-ignorant Harriet Harman announcing that NATS is the UK's civil aviation safety regulator, but the fact is they are not and we should all be getting quite concerned about who is calling the shots.
Not least because when the aircraft start flying, closely followed by the lawsuits for unnecessary total closures when a more thoughtful response might have saved everone a lot of trouble and money, the lawyers will need a target.
Who will it be? The CAA is taking no apparent role in all this, so they can only be accused of standing well away from any decision making. Nothing new there.
The Met Office? Well, no, they are only advising on where the cloud is, not the engineering safety of aircraft operations in it.
Gordon Brown? Nice idea, but he'll plead that it was NATS/CAA/EASA/Eurocontrol/The Conservatives/etc etc etc, "I was only taking the expert's advice."
So who is actually preventing aircraft from flying? We know how it's being done, in controlled airspace, and that NATS are doing that. But is the decision to do it taken solely by NATS on its own authority, with or without consultation with others? If so they are on very shaky ground indeed.
I sense some very lucrative lawsuits looming although not by me, regrettably. But who is responsible, the final decision-maker, the person whose desk says "the buck stops here", who gets sued?