Did Europe erupt into panic over the volcanic cloud threat? With flights restrictions set to be eased Tuesday, airlines and the media were asking if officials had over-reacted much as they appeared to have done with the swine flu outbreak.

The swift decisions to shut down airspace last Thursday was "motivated more by fear than science," said Jean-Dominique Giuliani, president of the Brussels-based Schuman Foundation, which studies European issues.

"Could the real culprit be the principle of precaution, this symbol of the fear which terrifies decision-makers?" he asked.

The closure of European airspace due to the dust clouds from an Icelandic volcano had ramifications far beyond Europe, vexing the media from London to Sydney.

"The health-and-safety Armageddon I long expected has arrived," bemoaned Simon Jenkins, in the London Guardian.

"It was bad enough to have an idiot with a shoe bomb stirring equally idiot regulators to enforce billions of pounds of cost and inconvenience on air travellers in the cause of 'it might happen again'," he complained.

"Now we have a volcano and a bit of dust. It is another swine flu."

An editorial in The Australian daily echoed his message, decrying "this out-of-proportion outrage."

The measures by air authorities in Europe were "based on the assumption that the state is obliged to protect us from every imaginable act of nature and human malignancy," the paper wrote.

"A year ago politicians and public health agencies were panicking first and asking questions later over swine flu. As it turned out, it was (at least to date) the pandemic that never was."

The airlines, suffering massive losses from the shutdown of much of Europe's air space, have lobbied fiercely for a more flexible approach to the ash cloud menace, while stressing that passenger safety remains essential.

"Risk assessment should be able to help us reopen certain corridors, if not the entire airspace," said Giovanni Bisignani, head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), after airlines carried out test flights.

"We are far enough into this crisis to express our dissatisfaction at how governments have managed the crisis," he told aviation reporters in Paris Monday.

British Airways said that a test flight to assess the risk of volcanic ash to its planes had found no problems, showing that a blanket airspace closure was "unnecessary".

Some 40 other test flights carried out throughout Europe also showed no engine problems from volcanic particles, the European Commission said.

The airspace lockdown, the biggest since the 2001 9/11 attacks in the United States, also highlighted a lack of coordination in the response of European nations: there was no agreement on what level of volcanic pollution should warrant a flight ban.

European governments maintain their sovereignty over the issue.

However the EU's Spanish presidency rejected the airlines' criticism.

"We are aware that they are going through a hard time," Spanish Transport Minister Jose Blanco told reporters after a video conference of transport ministers from across the European Union on Monday.

"This situation is causing them important losses, but safety is paramount," he added.

The safety-first principle, which persuades public powers to ban things to cover any doubt, notably in health or environmental issues, has sparked an energetic debate across Europe in recent years.

Some see the same fall-back position to ban in Europe's attitude to genetically modified crops, and certainly in the massive vaccination campaigns and stores of unused face masks linked to last year's H1N1 swine flu pandemic.

French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau is unrepentant as far as the Icelandic volcano is concerned.

"I think that in the matter of air security.. you can never take too many precautions," he said.

Meanwhile a senior US official warned Monday of potentially serious damage to military jets from the volcanic ash, after a buildup of glass was found in the engine of a NATO fighter plane in Europe.

"This is a very, very serious matter that in the not-too-distant future will start having real impact on military capabilities," the official told reporters.

earlier related report
New Europe flights give hope to stranded passengers
London (AFP) April 19, 2010 - European governments opened up the continent's airspace to new flights from Tuesday giving hope to hundreds of thousands of passengers around the world trapped by a cloud of volcanic ash crippling airlines.

The huge cloud of ash that has blanketed Europe forced the cancellation of another 20,000 flights on Monday and Britain and other governments sent navy ships and deployed other measures to rescue stranded passengers.

But under relentless pressure from airlines facing a new billion dollar-plus bill, EU transport ministers agreed to ease restrictions from Tuesday.

European air traffic control group, Eurocontrol, predicted after the announcement on easing curbs that flights over the continent could be running normally again by Thursday.

British authorities said they would lift the flight ban from 7:00 am (0600 GMT) on Tuesday, starting in Scotland and moving south as conditions improved. British Airways said it hoped to resume flights into and out of London from Tuesday evening.

France said it would begin to progressively reopen airports from Monday with restricted flights from Paris to start from early Tuesday.

Flights over Germany remained banned until the early hours of Tuesday, but some operated with special permission. A spokeswoman for German carrier Lufthansa said it had permission to land 50 flights from Asia, Africa and North and South America, carrying 15,000 passengers in total.

Three KLM flights carrying passengers left Amsterdam-Schiphol airport on Monday for Shanghai, Dubai and New York, the Dutch transport minister announced.

EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas said: "From tomorrow morning on, we should progressively see more planes start to fly."

But he insisted "there cannot be any compromise on safety. All the decisions must be based on scientific evidence and expert analysis."

Nearly seven million passengers have been affected by blanket shutdowns which governments said were essential but which airlines blame for unnecessary chaos and massive financial losses.

In Europe marooned passengers juggled hellish combinations of rail, boat and road links, zig-zagging across borders in desperate attempts to make it home -- whether to the other end of Europe or to the United States.

Britain ordered its flagship aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and HMS Ocean and HMS Albion to pick up thousands of Britons from France -- where they have come from all over Europe -- and Spain.

"This is the biggest challenge to our aviation transport network for many years," Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.

Spain, one of the rare countries operating normally, struck an agreement with Britain, France and Germany to fly hundreds of thousands of their nationals back to Europe via Spanish airports.

EU leaders have come under fire for their dealing with the chaos sparked by Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano, as forecasters predicted the ash cloud could soon reach Canada.

"This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess," said Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association.

Air France, British Airways, KLM and Lufthansa reported no problems after flights to test fears the ash cloud would destroy jet engines.

Authorities in Sweden, Croatia, Hungary and the Czech Republic announced the resumption of flights. Romania and Bulgaria announced their airspace had been reopened.

But as airlines argued their case, a senior US military official said the ash had affected one of NATO's F-16 fighter planes, which detected a glass build-up inside its engine.

Ash from volcanoes can be turned into a glass form at high temperatures when it passes through a jet engine.

Companies are losing 200 million euros (270 million dollars) per day according to the IATA.

The European Commission said it was prepared to authorise exceptional financial aid to airlines in line with regulations passed after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Winds have carried most of the ash spewing from Eyjafjoell across a wide swathe of Europe since last Wednesday, but the eruption "diminished markedly" and the column of ash is less than half its original height, seismologist Bryndis Brandsdottir of the University of Iceland told AFP.