The volcanic ash clouding the Heathrow airport forced airlines such as Air India, Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines to cancel their
flights on Friday, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. Aviation safety authorities in Germany, France and Sweden have also restricted the aircraft movement as the black smoke drifted into their territories.
The Heathrow airport alone handles nearly 1,300 flights a day. While the national carrier cancelled almost a dozen west-bound flights and rescheduled a few, Jet Airways cancelled all its flights to London, Brussels, Newark, New York and Toronto. Several foreign carriers, including Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic, which operate flights to the north and central Europe from India cancelled their flights.
“Lufthansa is complying with the directives issued by ministries and air traffic control and hence, has cancelled all scheduled flights from India to Frankfurt ,” the airline said in a statement. The European aviation authorities have restricted part of the airspace in the face of volcanic eruption in Iceland which covered the sky with smoke and ash.
The Mumbai-based Jet Airways has announced indefinite delay in its flights to and from Europe and North America. “We plan to resume flights as soon as London Heathrow and Brussels airports re-open ,” the airline said in a statement.
The UK’s leading air navigation service provider National Air Traffic Services (NATS) has said that restrictions preventing flights in English-controlled airspace will remain in place until Saturday at the earliest. Flight chaos in Europe worsens, affects millions
A HUGE ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano spread out across Europe on Friday causing air travel chaos on a scale not seen since the September 11 attacks and costing airlines hundreds of millions of dollars.
Significant disruption of European air traffic was expected on Saturday because of the dangers posed by volcanic ash drifting from Iceland, aviation officials said. Airports in much of Britain, France and Germany remained closed and flights were set to be grounded in Hungary and parts of Romania.
As many as 15,000 flights may be lost in the region on Friday, or about half the usual timetable, according to Brian Flynn, operations chief at Eurocontrol, which oversees the region’s flight paths. That’s up from 8,000 cancellations on Thursday. Ash from the eruption of Iceland’s 5,500-foot Eyjafjallajökull volcano drifted southeast overnight. While airports in Scotland, Norway and Ireland reopened, others are shutting as the cloud spreads and as many as six million passengers could be affected if the closures extend into a third day, according to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation.
“I would think Europe was probably experiencing its greatest disruption to air travel since 9/11,” a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority , Britain’s aviation regulator, said. “In terms of closure of airspace, this is worse than after 9/11. The disruption is probably larger than anything we’ve probably seen.” Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, US airspace was closed for three days and European airlines were forced to halt all transatlantic services.
Disruption from the volcanic ash eruption in Iceland is costing airlines more than $200 million a day, the air industry body, International Air Transport Association (IATA), said. “At current levels of disruption, IATA’s initial and conservative estimate of the financial impact on airlines is in excess of $200 million per day in lost revenues ,” the International Air Transport Association said in a statement.
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