The Government stands accused this afternoon of an “amateurish, on the cheap” approach to proper measurement of air quality – as a result of which civil airlines have been grounded for too long.

The Slog understands that civil servants throughout Europe have been covering their tracks in an effort to hide the fact that travel-safety restrictions have been based on modelling, rather than observing, the volcanic cloud’s movement and extent.

Amid claims of ‘a knee-jerk reaction by overzealous EU bureacrats’, airline pilots commenting on aeronautical websites seemed almost unanimous in their opposition to the continued grounding. One wrote:
‘From the beginning, their statements did not fall in line with the SIGMET charts published. It was just based on a mathematical prediction. Considering the cost involved, the disruption caused and the consequences this exercise can have on the global economy, one has to be amazed that they have been authorised to take such a decision without real proof.’

A conservative estimate of the cost to business in general has been estimated at more than 100 million Euros every day. Although unwilling to be openly critical in the media as yet, one senior airline official told us:

“Airlines in Europe are waking up to the fact that official decisions are deriving from inaccurate data. Decisions based on computer models are absolutely no substitute for observation. Our observations show conclusively that these planes should be in the air again. That the Government doesn’t seem to have such equipment smacks of underinvestment in the area.”

While there is an element of ‘they would say that’, this was a senior Air France executive involved in passenger safety. So far, Air France, British Airways, Lufthansa and Air Berlin – all highly respected carriers with top engineering safety experts – have undertaken test flights and conducted post-flight inspections, but found no evidence at all of ash particle residues. Another pilot added:

“The government has a duty towards taxpaying airlines, its passengers and staff to provide accurate evidence and information. I think that it is also the government’s responsibility to organise sampling, surveying and – once civil operations start gain – to monitor the PPM of ash in our airspace in order to guarantee safety at all times.”

He stressed that monitoring was needed, not modelling. The British Government comes in for particularly strong criticism on this basis. An air-traffic controller based at Gatwick commented:

“There’s evidence that people have been conned here. The distinct impression we were all given was that the ash had been observed. Now there’s a lot of back-pedalling going on, and it all looks fishy. This is typical of the Government – making gestures, but not coming up with the money for professional equipment”.

The charge from this and other sources – now rapidly becoming the official line at BA – is that the Government has relied on the cheaper modelling approach – as opposed to having the correct (expensive) monitoring equipment – specialist aircraft equipped with sensitive collection machinery and so on.

That the Government was aware of under-investment in this area is evidenced by its decision (announced January 7th this year) to invest more than £12 million in the development of better air-quality monitoring equipment. In addition, Parliamentary questions have been raised several times this year already about the UK Government’s intentions for the UK Met Office – amid suspicions that huge budget cuts were being planned.

Both Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell were yesterday falling back on ‘passenger safety comes first’, but sentiment among both pilots in particular and the industry as a whole was hardening this morning. Yet another pilot commented on an aeronautical engineering site:

‘If evidence shows that the airspace was closed based on wrong evidence and bad decision-making, governments that decided to close their airspaces shall pay for the financial and commercial disaster they have caused during one of few lucrative periods of the year.’