European Flight Disruption Intensifies as Iceland Ash Spreads

By Alex Morales and Steve Rothwell
April 16 (Bloomberg) -- Air service disruptions intensified as a cloud of ash from a volcano in Iceland spread across Europe and shut airports across the region, possibly leading to the cancellation of half of all departures today.
British airspace will be restricted until at least 1 a.m.
tomorrow, according to flight-control authority National Air Traffic Services, compounding disruptions that are among the most severe in U.K. aviation history. In Germany, 10 airports, including Frankfurt, were shuttered, according to the DFS air traffic control agency.
Thousands of flights were grounded yesterday after Iceland’s 5,500-foot, ice-covered Eyjafjöll volcano erupted and winds carried dust across a swath of northern Europe. Airports in the U.K., Norway and Sweden halted flights on concern that the plume could damage engines or parts such as speed sensors.
Six million passengers could be affected if the closures continue for as many as three days, according to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation.
"The outlook for today is in fact worse," said Brian Flynn, the head of operations at Eurocontrol, which oversees the region’s flight paths. "The forecast is that most of the northern European airports will remain closed for most of the day."
European airlines may cancel half of all flights today, or as many as 15,000 connections, Flynn said. That compares with about 8,000 cancellations yesterday, he said in a Bloomberg television interview today.

No Rapid Improvement

The ash-plume threat will continue through April 18 for Europe, AccuWeather.com said. NATS is not expecting a rapid improvement in the conditions. "In general, the situation cannot be said to be improving with any certainty as the forecast affected area appears to be closing in from east to west," the agency said in a statement.
Eruption-related disruptions may last for a further 48 hours, Kyla Evans, a spokeswoman for Eurocontrol said yesterday.
Delta Air Lines Inc. and UAL Corp.’s United Airlines led their peers in canceling European flights.
The plume covered parts of Britain, Germany, Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Russia as of 6 a.m. this morning in London, according to data from the U.K. Met Office’s volcanic-ash advisory service. It’s forecast to drift southeast today over northern France, Poland and the Czech Republic before reaching Switzerland, Austria and Hungary by midnight.

Grounded Planes

Airspace over northern Poland is closed and disruption may extend further south as the country prepares to welcome world leaders including Barack Obama for the funeral of the late President Lech Kaczynski on April 18. Delaying the funeral has become a "very serious possibility," according to the country’s presidential minister.
Ryanair Holdings Plc and EasyJet Plc, Europe’s two biggest discount airlines, both warned of disruptions. As the dust starts to clear in parts of Scotland and Ireland, other parts of Europe become engulfed, according to Eurocontrol.
"It’s a very limited reopening at the moment, and as one small part of air space opens, another one closes," Flynn said.
British Airways Plc, Europe’s third-biggest airline, said it can’t be sure when services will resume.
"Once they start operations again, obviously we will have aircraft in places they are not supposed to be," said Jonathan Nicholson, a spokesman for the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority.
"It takes time before normal operations resume once flying starts again."

Norway Closed

Bus operator National Express Group Plc said all services from Heathrow to Scotland were full yesterday and that extra vehicles will be added today. U.K. trains are running as normal.
Norway’s Avinor aviation authority said it cannot rule out that the country’s air space will remain closed today. France’s civil aviation authority shut the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports near Paris late yesterday. The closings will be in effect until at least 2 p.m.
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Europe’s second-biggest airline, yesterday canceled flights to and from the affected countries as well as to Amsterdam and Brussels to ease congestion caused by aircraft diverted to those hubs. It said it was monitoring forecasts to see if German airspace will be affected.
Iceland has more than 200 volcanoes and 600-plus hot springs. When Eyjafjöll last erupted in 1821 the event lasted more than a year, according to the Global Volcanism Program at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Unprepared

The latest eruption, which began early April 14, is a further blow to a country struggling to rebuild a crippled economy after financial collapse prompted the world’s fifth- richest nation per head in 2007 to turn to the International Monetary Fund.
Volcanic fumes have disrupted commercial air travel in the past. In 1982, all four engines on a British Airways Boeing Co.
747 flying to Perth, Australia, shut down as the aircraft encountered ash spewed from Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. The plane fell for almost four miles before the pilot was able to restart three engines and make an emergency landing in Jakarta.
Another Boeing jumbo lost all engine thrust in 1989 after encountering ash from Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano, and four other airliners were damaged during the next three months, according to the Federal Aviation Administration Web site.
"Given the fact that this could bring a plane down very easily, airlines are not going to risk flying through these volcanic clouds," Hunter Keay, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in Baltimore, said yesterday in an interview with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Radio.
Emmanuelle Wargon of Paris and her husband, Mathias, learned yesterday that their Air France flight to New York from Paris today had been canceled because of the eruption, and they may have to postpone a long-planned vacation with their three children, ages 12, 10 and 6.
"We had planned for all sorts of things," Wargon, a magistrate in France’s National Audit Office, said in a telephone interview. "But we didn’t plan for a volcano."