Over the past thousand years, Icelandic volcanic ash has been deposited in the UK at least ten times, the last occasion being in 1947. In geological terms, the gap between 1947 and 2010 is an instant, but in that time, UK civil aviation grew from carrying just one million passengers a year, to carrying over 218 million. The possibility of volcanic ash reducing the number of flights in UK airspace to zero for six days was similarly unprecedented until earlier this year, and it took a unique combination of events to bring it about.
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