In March last year I booked a ticket to fly from London to Washington Dulles for a meeting of the Flight Safety Foundation's international advisory committee. Within days the Icelandic volcano E15 (the letter E followed by 15 other random letters apparently), erupted spectacularly and my trip was duly cancelled along with those of thousands of other travellers.
Late last week I was back on the net to book Heathrow to Dulles for this year's meeting of the same committee, and guess what? At least Grimsvotn is slightly easier to pronounce...
Differences this year? The allowable concentrations are higher by orders of magnitude (mathematically incorrect perhaps but not hard from a starting point of zero); there is a lot more hardware available to track the location and concentration of the cloud; Europe has in place a co-ordinated disruption management process (time to see if it works); Grimsvotn's ash is coarser and heavier and should fall out of the atmosphere more quickly. But, and it is a big BUT for airlines, European Directive 261 is still in place so that unlike ferries, trains and coaches, they will still have to compensate passengers for 'force majeure' events like this one.
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