By Tim Worledge on April 26, 2010 12:03 PM

Earlier this month the UK government found itself stuck in an almost unprecedented perfect storm. Faced by a monstrous ash cloud spewing forth from an Icelandic volcano, which had already shut down much of Northwest Europe's airspace during a key vacation period, and with an increasingly tight-looking general election just weeks away, Downing Street fell back on an old fashioned response. It sent the fleet in.

In a very modern parallel of the British Army's evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940, three Royal Naval warships would, so the government announced, be dispatched to ports in France and Spain to round up sun-burnt and frazzled Brits and cart them home.

As events unfolded, the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano found an echo in the reaction of airline operators to the closure of airspace, as they poured forth their own molten response to what came to be regarded as the cavalier grounding of aircraft by governments on the basis of computer-derived ash cloud projections.

Airline body IATA slammed Europe's response on April 19, four days after UK airspace was first closed. Putting the cost to airlines of the disruption at $200 million a day, a figure it would later double, the industry body bluntly said decisions should be made on fact, not theory.

"We are far enough into this crisis to express our dissatisfaction on how governments have managed it - with no risk assessment, no consultation, no coordination, and no leadership," it boiled.

Already risking fresh ire from fraught airlines, the UK was poised to dispatch HMS Ark Royal and HMS Ocean to Calais, a port into which neither vessel would actually fit, and HMS Albion to Santandar in Spain to pick up determined holiday-makers who, like homing pigeons, were making their way by hook or by crook to ports along the Channel.

In the event, neither the Ark Royal nor HMS Ocean were called upon to serve, as the regular cross-Channel operators bolstered services to take up the slack. Nonetheless, HMS Albion sailed from Santandar on the afternoon of April 20, five days into the crisis, carrying some 300 tourists; call it a couple of full Boeing 737s-worth.

The following day, April 21, IATA upped its estimate on the damage done to the airline industry. While acknowledging a $110 million a day saving on fuel, airlines still lost revenues of $400 million, and IATA pressed for compensation from those who had forced the closure of the airways--the governments.

"I am the first one to say that this industry does not want or need bailouts," IATA's chief executive Giovanni Bisignani said in a press release.

"But this crisis is not the result of running our business badly. It is an extraordinary situation exaggerated with a poor decision-making process by national governments ... Governments should help carriers recover the cost of this disruption," he stated, while also pushing for relaxtion of restrictions on night flying and passenger compensation schemes.

However, revisiting the UK government's response raises some interesting questions. Waiting along with the UK holiday-makers in Santandar for the arrival of HMS Albion were 500 British soldiers returning from a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan. If the British Army was already re-routing soldiers through other countries, couldn't the airlines do the same?

I put this question to a spokesman at the UK Ministry of Defence's press office. After a brief introduction, a fully contextualized inquiry and several long silences, my answer came with the words; "Who is this, and why do you need to know?"

Unsurprisingly, he declined to comment. So I put the question to the press office at a major airline. The answer was no more enlightening, with the spokesman suggesting that perhaps the army's view of risk differed from that of the average commercial airline operator.

The spokesman did admit that it, along with other airlines, had looked at the possibility of using Spanish airports as hubs for European passengers trying to get into Northwest European locations, but that the ash cloud's move south and the subsequent closure of some Spanish airspace had made it a non-starter.

Although Spain was hit by the ash cloud, much of the disruption was triggered by the fact that flights taking off from Spanish airports were unable to land in other European destinations. On April 17, some of Spain's most northerly airports, from Barcelona to Gijon, were closed to aircraft, but by the afternoon of the following day the restrictions were lifted, while operations into Portugal were broadly unaffected by the ash throughout the key period.

By that time, momentum was already building to relax the flying ban, with some of the major European carriers mounting high profile test flights over and above the believed ash-permeated strata. Around the same time, the UK government announced a plan to use Spanish airports as hubs to allow stranded long haul passengers to at least get a foot on the European continent--a plan that the British military seemed to have already actively implemented.

Ultimately, it became something of a moot point, since ash cloud readings showed the density, along with the altitude of the cloud, was falling. Metereologists, transport experts and, critically, aircraft engine manufacturers were in agreement: with some caveats, it was once again safe to fly. On April 20, European airspace began to reopen.

Over ten days on from the eruption, the Airport Operators Association has become the latest industry body to add its voice to the calls for compensation, their prime assets fixed in position as the ash cloud stifled their business. Perhaps, given their relative flexability, if the airlines had reacted as quickly as Europe's governments did to the encroachment of ash on its regular routes, the passenger backlog wouldn't be quite as pronounced as it is.