The pyro-electrical storm that is raging over the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland is being upstaged by an oubreak of greed versus caution, airlines versus authorities, pilots versus pilots and passengers versus travel insurance companies.

It’s a real shouting match, and the latest word from Qantas and other long-distance carriers is that flights from Australia to London are unlikely to resume before Wednesday.

The hard and gritty facts are that no airline with flights that enter the volcanic ash-affected airspace over Europe at between 11,000 and 13,000 metres altitude is going to deliberately fly through the denser plumes of volcanic ash.

Eyjafjallajokull

The reasons are many and compelling. Airlines don’t fly into closed airspace, volcanic ash kills jet engines (whether immediately or later), and their insurance policies would be void. And lots of dead people are very, very bad for brand value.

The angst expressed by some airlines and airports in Europe overnight about an ‘over-reaction’ to the blanket ash-cloud bans was about the ‘blanket’ bit. That, and macho pilots shouting at cowardly cautious pilots on notice boards where most of the participants are probably teenagers inhabiting the cyber fantasy blog-o-sphere and playing with Microsoft flight simulators.

As the crisis that broke out on Thursday set in it became apparent there were zones where the density of the particles was much lighter or even negligible, which looks promising for short-haul flights that can be kept to altitudes of 8000 metres or lower: well below most of the gunk.

But stringing together those ‘holes’ for a long-haul jet, at the end of a 13-hour flight in some cases, and at higher altitudes, is not something that Eurocontrol or other air navigation authorities were ready or capable of doing, and it is not necessarily feasible, either.

Today there are Russian jets flying from Moscow to the US via southern Spain and northern African routes, and during the crisis some services have been able to find clear skies to Rome, and even, at intervals, major Scandinavian airports.

None of which is very useful to those stranded in Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong or Dubai, but by and large being fed and accommodated for free by their airlines since last Thursday night when their flights to northern Europe were denied access to European airspace.

The airlines are almost pleading with the stranded to fly back home, free, with a full refund, and try again. And some of the stranded have discovered ‘act of God’ escape clauses in their travel insurance policies, which means ‘God’ hates them because the non-refundable deposits on, say, hotels and tours, don’t look like being covered.

This is the ugly side of insurance. Insurers wriggle out of what people sometimes think they have insured themselves against, although not always.

The ugliness between the authorities who imposed the airspace bans and Lufthansa, Air Berlin, KLM and others reflects frustration.

But volcanic ash is nasty if it runs through an engine, both immediately and later. The engines are as hot as volcanos: the grit can melt and pit hot engine surfaces, and also, even in fine, microscopic amounts, corrode the surface of compressor blades. It can cause maintenance problems long after ingestion.

The manufacturers’ procedures for dealing with dust ingestion are compulsory and expensive, even if the exposure seems trivial.

The only solution to the crisis is for the plumes to break up and disperse to levels where they are no longer a risk to flight, and that depends on the vagaries of the winds, and the volcano, which continues to erupt.

While the outlook is a bit better, the future is hostage to an active volcanic zone that last behaved badly long before the age of flight began, but did so for months on end.

The Eyjafjallajokull volcano and the nearby dormant, but much larger, Mount Katla volcano, are capable of larger and more sustained eruptions that would change the news from being about air links to Europe to the collapse of northern hemisphere agriculture and an ensuring famine.