Originally Posted by
Jumbodriver
The BA9 flew through the plume, not the cloud. Big big difference. As one of my more erudite colleagues put it "I wouldnt put my hand in a glass of sulphuric acid, but id happily jump in a pool that the glass had been poured into"
Poor analogy.
A better comparison would be if you drank the pool water at a rate of 1,000 gallons per hour. Then that glass of acid would have serious consequences.
Every day hundreds of flights are re-routed around active volcanos around the world. The generally-accepted buffer distance is about 500 miles from the ash cloud.
Governments in Europe used the 500 mile "safe zone" as the determining factor in closing airspace.
They really had no choice under the circumstances.