Originally Posted by
Droopystop
It all boils down to what you want to pay for risk management: inconvenience and monetry costs or several hundred body bags.
Much as we might not like it, the monetary cost of safety is quite important. The airline industry has lost about £1b (which European Society will pay for in some way - insurance, taxes, lost jobs). If we were going to spend £1bn to sve more lives this year was shutting down the airspace the best way of doing it? Realistically how many lives where saved? Not one life has ever been lost in an ash incident to date, and all of those incidents involved significant dust not a broad probabilistic view of 'maybe dust'.
I would argue a 6 day shutdown was a poor spend of a billion pounds. The first day or two was probably a good spend, giving a time to plan to mitigate the higher risks.