Originally Posted by
peter we
Indeed, why did the industry fail to plan for this, given it was so widely predicted and expected and a legal requirement. You will notice that non of the company officials affected have been sued which is remarkable given their failure.
Surely any plan to continue airline operations through closed airspace (for whatever reason - eg 9/11 US airspace shutdown) would be illegal and threfore somewhat unwise to put on record.
Any explicit plans to lobby / pressure / bribe poliiticians to lift flight bans is probably in the same category.
Contingency planning for the displaced passengers appeared to work exactly as you'd expect, making allowance for the unprecedented number of flights affected and area of airspace closed (which seemed to be more, and for longer, than any previous volcano elsewher in the world - but that's just my impression, I don't have hard data)
- Tour operators fully reponsible for accomodation and transport of pax did so where overland was feasible (in my exp) - there were huge convoys of coaches doing 1000s of miles across various bits of europe, within 48hrs (I was in one of them). Cruise ships were also chartered I recall.
- Airlines that usually plan to live up to thier obligations to look after pax in the event of cancellation mostly did so through normal plans - but with efficency impacted again by the unprecedented number of flights affected
- The airlines that normally plan to do as little as they can possibly get away with also seemed to follow plan (refund 99p fare and leave the pax to arrange their own way back)