The Island Volcanic Ash: Eyjafjallajokul
Airports Close for Second Day as Ash Spreads Across Europe
By ALAN COWELL, NICOLA CLARK and MARK McDONALD
April 15, 2010
PARIS — Air travel chaos across the globe deepened on Friday as a vast, high-altitude plume of volcanic ash from Iceland spread farther across northern and central Europe, forcing the authorities to close airspace and ground airplanes to forestall potentially dangerous damage to jet engines.
By Friday morning, most of Europe’s major airports — crucial hubs for international travelers — were closed. Thousands of flights had been canceled since the disruption began on Thursday, stranding or delaying millions of passengers from North America to Asia.
“I’ve never seen such chaos,” said Erich Klug, 35 , a buyer for an auto parts company who was stranded at the Frankfurt airport after it closed down on Friday. Hundreds of people there stood in line to buy train tickets for onward travel.
Aviation authorities said there was no prospect of a return to normal flights until Saturday at the earliest, raising questions about a wide range issues from the economy and business to family vacations and even to whether President Obama would be able to fly to the funeral on Sunday of the Polish president and his wife, killed in an unrelated air crash last week.
Neither did the volcanic eruption in Iceland seem to be easing. At 6 a.m. Friday local time, the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center reported in London, there was still “significant eruption continuing.” The volcano erupted Wednesday for the second time in a month, forcing evacuations and causing flooding about 75 miles east of Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital. Icelandic airports remained open because they are west of the volcano and wind was blowing the ash away to the south and east.
For the first time, an international agency warned on Friday of potential health risks. In Geneva, the World Health Organization said people with respiratory problems should “limit their activities outdoors or stay indoors” if ash started falling from the sky.
In a telephone interview, a spokesman, Dan Epstein, said there were no apparent health risks if the ash stayed in the upper atmposphere. But if the ash reached the ground, people with illnesses such as asthma, emphysema and bronchitis could be at risk.There have been no reports of significant amounts of ash falling on densely populated areas.Eurocontrol, the agency in Brussels that is responsible for coordinating air traffic across the region, said the cloud’s impact “will continue for at least the next 24 hours.”
British authorities, which closed all British airspace Thursday for the first time in many people’s memory, said Friday there would be no flights over England until early Saturday morning at the earliest.
Germany’s civil aviation authority said that as of noon, all German airspace, except Munich airport, was closed and would remain so until 6 p.m.
Thomas Uber, a spokesman for Frankfurt airport, a major hub for Lufthansa, said “no one knows” how long the facility would be closed but the re-opening would be much later than initially foreseen at mid- afternoon. “The cloud is way up north but we are erring on the safe side,” he said. As a measure of the disruption, he said the airport set up 1,000 cots in open terminal areas last night and almost all were taken.
Lufthansa, the country’s flag carrier, said passengers for flights within Germany were being offered vouchers at airport check-in counters for rail tickets to their destinations. Passengers to destinations outside Germany were being offered free re-bookings on other flights, the airline said on its Web site.
Eurocontrol said it expected more than 60 percent of the 28,000 scheduled flights across Europe would be cancelled on Friday. Of the 300 flights that would usually arrive in Europe in the morning from other areas, only about one third arrived Friday, Eurocontrol said.
The disruption Friday seemed to be setting a new pattern as the volcanic plume drifted slowly eastward over central Europe and western Russia, moving away from the areas first affected. As Ireland, to the west, and Scotland to the north eased restrictions, Czech authorities to the east in central Europe, began closing down their airspace. Eurocontrol said that much of Polish airspace, including the Warsaw airport, was now closed and said the region would likely continue to face severe disruptions to air travel for at least another 24 hours.
It was not immediately clear if that would affect world leaders planning to attend the state funeral on Sunday of President Lech Kaczynski of Poland and his wife.
Before the volcano erupted, the White House said President Obama would depart Washington on Saturday evening to fly to Krakow, Poland, for the funeral. For many Europeans, the closures seemed a puzzle.
While satellite photographs from above show the cloud to be dark and menacing, it remains largely invisible from the ground. Reporters in Paris, London and Frankfurt said Friday that the skies overhead were blue and mostly clear.
At Frankfurt airport, Dominique Spiesser, 54, a chemical engineer from Switzerland who was on a business trip in India, said he only learned that the airport was closed after his flight landed early Friday.Gesturing toward a patch of sunlight streaming down a nearby stairwell, Mr. Spiesser said: “When you see sunshine like that it’s difficult to understand.”
Nonetheless, the plume represents a severe threat to aircraft, aviation authorities said, as it is made up of minute particles of silicate that can disable jet engines, forcing planes to stall in flight.
By Friday the tally of airport closings, which began Thursday in Scotland, had spread to Heathrow and Gatwick in Britain; Charles de Gaulle and Orly in Paris; Frankfurt; and hubs in Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic.
Britain’s National Air Traffic Service said Friday that restrictions on flights in English-controlled airspace would remain in effect until 1 a.m. Saturday “at the earliest.”
The agency noted that some airspace closures had been lifted in Northern Ireland and the northern parts of Scotland, and that some airports — including Glasgow — had reopened and would remain so until 7 p.m. But the bulk of Britain’s airports, including London, would remain closed.
“In general, the situation cannot be said to be improving with any certainty,” the agency said.
About 6,000 scheduled flights use British airspace in an average day, aviation experts said. The ash from the volcano, Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl), was reported to be drifting at 18,000 to 33,000 feet above the earth. At those altitudes, the cloud is directly in the way of commercial airliners but not an immediate health threat to people on the ground, the International Volcanic Health Hazard Network, based in Britain, said on its Web site.
The closing of British airspace disrupted the great majority of trans-Atlantic flights, including those on the New York-London route, the second busiest international route in the world after the Hong Kong to Singapoore, Taiwan, route, according to the International Air Transport Association. Eurocontrol said roughly half of the 600 daily flights between North America and Europe probably faced cancellations or delays on Friday.
Severe disruption extended all the way to the Asia-Pacific, where major carriers like Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines and Qantas, the Australian airline, were among those that canceled, delayed or diverted flights to and from Europe on Thursday and Friday. Qantas, which cancelled various flights on Friday, said in a statement that it would also not offer flights to London and Frankfurt on Saturday.
Major American carriers that fly to Britain were allowing their passengers to rebook flights without penalty on Thursday. The potential economic effect of the closings is “virtually impossible” to determine at this stage, said Peter Morris, chief economist at Ascend, an aviation consultancy in London.
“A ballpark estimate would be that half a million to a million people’s travel will be disrupted in the U.K. over a couple of days, assuming things start to clear up soon,” he said. “For the long-haul players, especially those headed to the other side of the world, it’s a nightmare.”
Globally, the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, an industry consultancy based in Sydney, said Friday that if the disruptions continued for three days “some 6 million passengers will be affected” — and many could forfeit their flights.
In recent decades, more than 90 aircraft have suffered damage from volcanic plumes, according to the International Civil Aviation Authority, an arm of the United Nations.
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