Ryanair flies plane through Scottish ash ‘red zone’

Irish budget airline Ryanair on Tuesday flew a plane through Scottish airspace regulators say has "high ash concentration" in a bid to show there was no danger from a volcanic eruption in Iceland.
Ryanair operated a one-hour verification flight at 41,000 feet on Tuesday morning from Glasgow to Inverness to Aberdeen and on to Edinburgh through areas it said the Civil Aviation Authority had designated a "red zone" of high ash concentration. "There was no visible volcanic ash cloud or any other presence of volcanic ash and the post flight inspection revealed no evidence of volcanic ash on the airframe, wings or engines," the statement said.
"Ryanair's verification flight this morning also confirms that the 'red zone' over Scotland is non-existent," it said.
About 250 flights to northern Britain were cancelled on Tuesday over concerns about the ash cloud spewing from an Icelandic volcano, but British and Irish officials dismissed fears of a mass shutdown of airspace.
Ryanair, Europe's largest low-cost airline, is a vocal critic of regulators' decision to close skies over Europe during an eruption last year after it was forced to cancel almost 10,000 flights in April and May at a cost of 30 million euros.
Ryanair said it had received written confirmation from both its airframe and engine manufacturers that it is safe to operate in areas designated "red zones".
"You have to ask why a combination of bureaucratic incompetence in the CAA and the Met Office last night shut the skies over Scotland when this morning we have now confirmed there is no volcanic ash material in the atmosphere over Scotland," CEO Michael O'Leary told BBC television.
"The Met Office produce these nonsensical forecasts of where this mythical ash cloud was going to go," he said. "Two thousand kilometres south of Iceland there is almost no presence of volcanic ash in the atmosphere because it is dissipating."