Flying Resumes

While I am pleased to hear that the people who have been stranded by the Volcanic Ash, will be able to return, I personally am very concerned that the reasons for this is financial and that it is actually safe.

In Europe, if there had been an incident where an aircraft had crashed, the responsibility would have been on the civil air authorities. While in America, the safety is legally with the individual airlines. Thus, the relatives could ultimately sue the Airline. Here it would be the civil air authorities that could be sued. However, while there are many volcanic eruptions across the planet, this is the first time that one has, whilst spewing ash into the most crowded airspace in the world.

I genuinely hope that there is not a crash, nor a incident where a plane has suffered serious engine failure and has to make an emergency landing somewhere.

I have never been so exasperated but to hear some of the stupid comments by the people saying that the shut down of air space was an over reaction. While a single aircraft can make manoeuvres to get out of trouble if during a flight it encounters the ash cloud, but with more than a thousand aircraft over the Atlantic at any one moment, would that aircraft have the safe space to move into? This even assumes that the pilot and the instruments can detect the ash. As the ash is not detectable on radar.

I strongly suspect that there will be an incident sooner or latter. As the ash is highly abrasives and damages engines, I can see that an aircraft could become damaged and then suffer a catastrophic failure well away from the area of concern.

Personally I just will not be flying in the near future myself as while I don't think that it is totally unsafe, for financial reasons, the aviation industry has been prepared to compromise safety.