Posted on 04/26/2010 7:30:19 AM PDT by ventanax5
Britain's airspace was closed under false pretences, with satellite images revealing there was no doomsday volcanic ash cloud over the entire country.
Skies fell quiet for six days, leaving as many as 500,000 Britons stranded overseas and costing airlines hundreds of millions of pounds.
Estimates put the number of Britons still stuck abroad at 35,000. However, new evidence shows there was no all-encompassing cloud and, where dust was present, it was often so thin that it posed no risk.
The satellite images demonstrate that the skies were largely clear, which will not surprise the millions who enjoyed the fine, hot weather during the flight ban.
Jim McKenna, the Civil Aviation Authority's head of airworthiness, strategy and policy, admitted: 'It's obvious that at the start of this crisis there was a lack of definitive data.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Mistakes like this should bring down governments.
Junk in the engines will drop a plane like a rock, and it doesn't take much.
The airlines were weighing inconvenience against the possibility of debris ingestion and LOTS of deaths.
Frankly, I'll take sleeping on a chair in Heathrow any day of the week over plunging to my death from 30,000 feet.
And now for an attack on Killer Volcano Cloud Skeptics....
It will be found to be a deliberate plan to increase revenues for hotels, alternative travel means, etc. in certain European countries. This was the sole purpose of the flying ban.
I guess the engines of those Airliners were ruined by the northern lights.
I wonder if we could use these models for global warming predictions and to provide a basis for a trillion dollar tax scheme and the re-ordering of society?
Oh wait, they already did that.....
My dad was a specialist in aviation disaster litigation back in the day.
The safety margin is not all that wide when you're talking about debris in the air. Sometimes you have to make a judgment call, and people are only screaming about being stuck abroad because we didn't have multiple engine failures from ingestion of ash.
The cloud may have been much less dangerous that previously feared.
Of course if there had been no precautions taken and there were planes falling out of the sky due to destroyed engines, the same pinheads now decrying an excess of caution would be decrying a lack of caution.
Pinheads - always complaining.
I’d rather side with “caution”.....
Why don't people lose their jobs over false scare tactics? Why don't facts and evidence mean anything anymore?
Dust that can cripple an engine can be so fine you cannot see it
I would NOT want to fly though it- it is already shown that it can destry an engine
It may be small and hard to see, but at hundreds of miles per hour the engine is sucking in a LOT of air- and any fine dust can destroy it
Yeah, I'm kidding.
But the Leftist Leaders had the best of intentions!!!/s
The sky is falling!
The sky is falling!
The sky is falling!
“The National Air Traffic Control Service decision to ban flights was based on Met Office computer models which painted a picture of a cloud of ash being blown south from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.”
Seriously. So they made a mistake. A mistake on the side of protecting thousands of lives. So yeah, maybe they misunderestimated the risk, and thousands of people were inconvienenced, but at least they’re alive now to whine about it.
Could you imagine the uproar if just ONE flight had crashed due to debris?
That’s just a tad overwrought. The aircraft that have actually suffered engine damage from a volcanic ash cloud flew through a cloud, not a dispersed remnant.
That’s pretty much the argument the global warming crowd uses.
No spirit of adventure...
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