To Fly or Not to Fly

After a week of near closure of all European air space for last 5 days, planes have started flying again in the European sky. It still not normal service, but they will get there soon.

And what made this transition from near total closure to near full opening of air space ? Did the volcano in Iceland suddenly ceased all its recent activities and went back snoozing again? Or did the ash went flying into some other direction due o a change in wind and weather? Or did they confirm that the volcanic ash would not damage the plane engine?

The answer is none of these. It has been opened because the airlines were making huge losses. They estimated it to be close to $1 billion already. And apparently the passenger safety is of much less value (how much exactly in US dollars, according the airline bosses?).

It is the general problem in today's world; everything is a business decision. Anything that does not appear on the balance sheet of big companies is just not important.

True, the prolonged air space closure poses big problem world wide and has to be addressed. And the air space should be opened immediately if it is safe to fly. But only if it IS safe to fly, and not just because some companies are loosing some (or may be a few million) money.

So it is the call for flight engineers, pilots, meteorologists and scientists with the knowledge of volcanic ash properties. But somehow they have been left out in the process. Once again, the decisions have been taken by the Mighty Managers, instead.

There have been talks of some "test flights" being flown by a few airlines. But which route did these test flights follow? in what altitude? For how long did they fly? No one knows the answers to these questions. In short it is not clear if these tests are actually of any value. Neither the testing criteria nor the findings have been assessed by the experts.

Every effort should be made to open the airspace, but only after assessing the situation in a proper, scientific way. Passenger safety should be of paramount importance, no matter how many gazillion dollar are being lost by the airlines.

Call me old fashioned, but I think even a single human life is worth much more than that.