Sorry, to be clear, of course volcanic eruptions will happen again, the same disruption to air travel won’t.
The MET office called the closure of the skies and couldn’t make a call on when it was safe to reopen them. In frustration Michael O’Leary threw a plane into the sky and they examined the ‘damage’ which in particular was increased wear rates on lighting and turbine blades. The consequence being maintenance cycles being reduced to varying degrees dependent on the ash density.
After everything died down a conference/ debrief with government, met office, CAA and others was held to work out what went wrong. The met office admitted that since they had no clear criteria for closing the skies they struggled to justify the reopening. Post the conference a significant sum was spent buying and fitting out a plane with sensors and monitoring that the met office can use to gather measurable data. Using this data in a future ash cloud situation airlines will be able to judge for themselves whether the wear rates make flying commercially viable, whether flight altitudes can be adjusted to reduce the wear rates etc. Since over the pandemic O’Leary has shown he is prepared to run empty planes he’d certainly run fuller ones with increased maintenance costs. Others will make similar judgements in varying degrees.
