Obviously bad ideas

Man, so flights in/out/around Europe have basically been grounded since Wednesday, due to a massive ash cloud taking up about 20,000 vertical feet or so of airspace over most of the continent. The idea is that the ash will fuck up jet engines and cause them to stall out. It turns out, though, that business is much smarter than science. Who needs knowledge when you have/need money? Not people running airlines, that's for sure:

Several major airlines safely flew test flights without passengers over Europe on Sunday despite official warnings about the dangers of a volcanic ash plume, fueling a corporate push to end an economically devastating ban on commercial air traffic...

The announcement prompted some airline officials to wonder whether authorities had overreacted to concerns that the tiny particles of volcanic ash could jam up the engines of passenger jets. The possibility that the ash had thinned or dispersed over parts of Europe heightened pressure from airline officials losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day to end a flight stoppage that has thrown global travel into chaos and left millions stranded far from home.

Here we can see an excellent example of (I am about to hijack a phrase from Bad Religion and insert my own concept into it) the voracious march of capital. This is obviously a fucking dangerous situation, and the people running these companies are plainly declaring their will to chew up bodies in their relentless pursuit of money.

I don't really understand how the airline companies could spin this one. What could they possibly say, that the aviation authorities across the continent are too cautious? Like that's a bad thing? They don't want to send many thousands of people a day into conditions that are patently hazardous? If it were America, a bunch of right wing fucks would be crying about how the people in charge of aviation regulation are freedom-hating, socialists/communists who wish to stop capitalism. Maybe that's going on in places over there, too. Don't know.

Anyway, yeah, the people running these airlines don't really give much of a fuck. They want/need their money and are willing to risk just about anything for it. They are saying now that there is no danger, all because they flew a couple of planes around without crashing them. Assuming that they really did fly the planes and there really were no problems, a couple of flights is absolutely no indication of what would come if all flights were to resume.

How deliberately shortsighted. What a shitty, evil attempt to fool people into false comfort. You can't run an experiment ten times and accurately cite it as representative of the results of performing it thousands of times a day.