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Spanish authorities have closed nineteen airports in the country due to an ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland.
Nine airports were closed early this morning, and six more were closed at 12:00 local time (10:00 UTC). At 15:30 local time, the remaining four airports were closed, including Spain’s second largest airport at Barcelona. According to Eurocontrol, an agency that is responsible for aviation safety in Europe, said additional airports in Portugal and France were expected to be closed as well.
The closures are forecast to affect nearly 40,000 people, and over 400 flights are to be canceled. Limited traffic into the affected airports will be allowed to resume at 02:00 local time (00:00 UTC) Sunday morning. Authorities warned, however, that the cloud had the potential to affect air travel into next week.
The cloud of ash causing the latest closure is 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) long, the result of recently intensifying eruptions from the volcano. Ash is rising up to 30,000 feet into the air, although Eurocontrol said the risk of ash contamination was particularly high up to 20,000 feet.
An official at Eurocontrol said: “We hope that this incident won’t be quite as devastating as last time. However, that depends on the spread of the ash cloud because there is a very extensive area over the north Atlantic if the winds change, there will be very significant closures in Europe today.”
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Air travel disruption after the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption
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Wednesday, April 21, 2010
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The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said today that the flight disruptions triggered by the recent eruption of a volcano in Iceland cost the global airline industry a total of $1.7 billion dollars.
For an industry that lost $9.4bn last year and was forecast to lose a further $2.8bn in 2010, this crisis is devastating
—Giovanni Bisignani, CEO of the IATA
According to the IATA, airlines lost a total of $400 million daily for the first three days of the week that European airspace was closed. The closures also impacted an estimated 1.2 million passengers around the world each day, until airspace around Europe began reopening last night. IATA’s chief executive officer, Giovanni Bisignani, said that “[f]or an industry that lost $9.4bn last year and was forecast to lose a further $2.8bn in 2010, this crisis is devastating.” He also claimed that the airline industry would require three years to recover from the effects of the crisis, and called on governments to provide some form of compensation to airlines.
Bisignani also criticized the response of European governments to the ash threat, saying that they had over-reacted and the shutdown of all airspace was excessive. He said that “Airspace was being closed based on theoretical models, not on facts. Test flights by our members showed that the models were wrong. [The crisis] is an extraordinary situation exaggerated by a poor decision-making process by national governments.” Individual airlines also criticized the airspace closures. Micheal O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, said that “It might have made sense to ground flights for a day or two…But by the time that that cloud has dispersed through 800 or 1,000 nautical miles of air space, a full ban should never have been imposed.”
In defense of the European airspace controller, Eurocontrol, the CEO of the Irish Aviation Authority, Eamonn Brennan, said: “It’s important to realize that we’ve never experienced in Europe something like this before. So it wasn’t just a simple matter of saying: Yes, you could have operated on Saturday or Sunday or Monday. We needed the four days of test flights, the empirical data, to put this together and to understand the levels of ash that engines can absorb.” Additionally, scientists in Switzerland said that studies of ash content in the atmosphere were high enough that the total closure of most European airspace was warranted.
Restrictions over air travel in Europe have been lifted in many parts of the continent today; three-quarters of the scheduled flights were operating, and most of the European airspace having been opened. Only parts of British, French and Irish airspace remain closed, and most of Europe’s major airports are open, although not necessarily operating at full capacity; at London Heathrow Airport, about half the scheduled departing flights were canceled.
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Related news
“Europe’s airline chaos: in depth” — Wikinews, April 17, 2010
“European airspace closed by volcanic ash” — Wikinews, April 15, 2010
This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.
Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.
Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.
Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.
