The BBC reporting of the closure of European airspace appears to be somewhat short on the actual facts and it would seem to me that their angle on the story is designed to portray the ban as un-necessary.

Compare and contrast.

Firstly the BBC :

One of the airlines that carried out tests over the weekend was Dutch carrier KLM.

Its chief executive Peter Hartman, who was on board, said there was “nothing unusual” about the flight.

“If the technical examination confirms this… we then hope to get permission as soon as possible to partially restart our operations,” he added.

Steven Verhagen, vice-president of the Dutch Airline Pilots Association, told the Associated Press news agency: “In our opinion there is absolutely no reason to worry about resuming flights.”

Meanwhile, British Airways was conducting its own test flight on Sunday afternoon, with Willie Walsh, a trained pilot, on board. The BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, understands that the airline fears it might not be allowed to fly normal services until Thursday at the earliest.

Germany’s two biggest airlines, Lufthansa and Air Berlin, also said they had carried out test flights without apparent damage, as did Air France.

So, from that we could conclude that there is no need at all for the ban as all the airlines above carried out test flights and nothing untoward happened.

Secondly, the Huffington Post :

With the prospect of days under the cloud of ash, pilots and aviation officials sought to dodge the dangerous grit by adjusting altitude levels.

Germany’s airspace ban allows for low-level flights to go ahead under so-called visual flight rules, in which pilots don’t rely on their instruments.

Lufthansa took advantage of that to fly 10 empty planes to Frankfurt from Munich on Saturday in order to have them in the right place when the restrictions are lifted, airline spokesman Wolfgang Weber said.

The planes flew at about 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) – well below their usual altitude – in close coordination with air traffic control.

KLM is carrying out a test flight from Schiphol to Dusseldorf at 3,000 meters or lower, hoping for approval to carry out more low-altitude flights in Europe if the ash problem continues.

So much for the test flights. We have airlines flying around at low level to avoid the dust whilst moving their fleets around the airports, all whilst flying at a level that consumes vast quantities of fuel and makes a racket on the ground.

Living under the main North-South flightpath in the UK as I do, where on most days you can usually count upwards of 16 planes at any one time in the sky, I don’t think it would be too pleasant to have them all flying around at that level for long although I am pretty sure that the vast amounts of money at stake here will override keeping the noise down for the poor buggers on the ground.