Ex-Spurts

Volcanoes, what can you do with them!? Damned inconvenience all round. The current difficulty as Jeremy Clarkson put it in the Sunday Times, is that the ash cloud is bad enough to bring down airliners but not enough to actually see. So where did the decision come from to close British airspace? From history, from previous occurrences. Alarmingly a 747 plunged tens of thousands of feet when it flew through a volcanic plume and all four engines stopped. Scary enough? Volcanic ash is highly abrasive and will destroy engines and abrade glass making being able to see to land a challenge. Naturally the thinking stops here. Had the 747 mentioned above been told of the volcano, they would have avoided it. Did the authorities close airspace after taking samples thus averting damage to aircraft and possible tragedy? Apparently not, instead they saw the wind blowing the ash this way and that was it. As with AGW and so much else, what interest is there in facts and observation, when theory has it covered. I'm sure the 'experts' would warn us that they wouldn't be thanked for not being careful and then a plane comes down. Maybe not, but a default 'guesstimate isn't what we expect either. Ex-spurt='ex' is a has been and 'spurt' is a drip under pressure.