In the ageless contest between man and nature, nature reasserted its primacy for an entire week, crippling air travel around the world and sending shudders through the global economy, AP reported. Man is now studying the lessons of the volcanic eruption to see how to, if not tame it, at least live with it. From science to politics, the cloud of volcanic ash that drifted into the bustling air corridors of Europe revealed the inadequacy of the response system to an unfamiliar disaster. It is leading to a thorough post-mortem of an event that scientists say could recur any time _ and perhaps with even greater severity. Civil authorities reacted with extreme caution immediately after the April 14 explosion of Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) volcano, imposing a blanket no-fly ban in skies stretching from Scotland to Hungary. More than 100,000 flights were canceled, affecting some 1.2 million travelers a day. «The unpreparedness of the whole decision-making chain was evident from the start,» said David Henderson, a spokesman for the Association of European Airlines. Siim Kallas, the European Union transport commissioner, said he will begin working next week with colleagues to lay out a road map for similar events. The list of questions he faces is long and complex: How to measure the density and trajectory of an ash cloud; how to determine the safety threshold for each kind of engine; how to weigh the potential economic fallout against the potential danger; how to balance passengers' rights against the industry's health; how to coordinate the response to a crisis? Some answers almost certainly will compromise the jealously guarded sovereignty with which each nation has protected its air space, even as it relinquished an ever increasing share of control on the ground to the bureaucracy in Brussels. Kallas said Friday he will present preliminary thoughts to the EU's executive next Tuesday. Among them, he will propose speeding up the plan to unify control over all European skyways. «The absence of a single European regulator for air traffic control made it very difficult to respond to this crisis,» he told reporters. «We needed a fast, coordinated European response to a crisis. Instead, we had a fragmented patchwork of 27 national air spaces. ... We need a single European regulator for a single European sky.» The EU had planned to start putting the Single European Sky reforms into effect in 2012, but Kallas said the latest crisis showed «we cannot afford to wait that long.» -- SPA
