Northern European airspace closed after volcanic eruption

Tens of thousands of passengers were left stranded across northern Europe after airspace was closed in many places on Thursday and Friday. A huge cloud of volcanic ash from a volcano that erupted in Iceland on Wednesday led authorities to ground planes.

A cloud of volcanic ash from an Icelandic volcano caused mass disruptions to air traffic across Europe. The European air traffic control authority, Eurocontrol, ordered that parts of Dutch - as well as German and Belgian - airspace be closed due to safety concerns caused by the ash cloud.

Dozens of flights from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport were cancelled on Thursday afternoon before the airport was completely closed at 7 pm. A spokesperson for Eurocontrol was unable to say how long the disruption would last. "We are judging the situation by the hour and by the flight zone," said Lucia Pasquini.

Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded across northern Europe as British, Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finish airports were also affected. A spokesman for the Scandinavian airline SAS said the flight ban there could remain in force for as long as "several days".

Clog the engines

British air traffic control service NATS posted a statement on its website saying: "Volcanic ash represents a significant safety threat to aircraft." Airports in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Belfast and London cancelled all flights. Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports, processes 1,300 flights and 200,000 passengers per day alone.

British volcanologist David Rothery told the BBC: "If volcanic ash particles are ingested into a jet engine, they accumulate and clog the engines with molten glass."

In 1989, a KLM Boeing 747-400 flying from Amsterdam to Tokyo lost power in all four engines when it passed through a volcanic ash cloud emitted by the Mount Redoubt volcano. The plane dropped four kilometres, but the pilots managed to get it on the ground safely by carrying out an emergency landing.

Second eruption

On Wednesday, the volcano under Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull glacier spewed out a huge column of steam and smoke for the second time in a month. Fine rock particles were ejected up to 11 kilometres into the atmosphere and drifted toward Scandinavia and Britain.

Up to 800 residents had to be evacuated from the area around the volcano. The eruption under the 200-metre thick glacier caused ice to melt. The water flooded nearby valleys and threatened to damage a highway and several bridges.