Air travel watchdog slams Europe’s handling of ash cloud

PARIS/OSLO - European governments have been highly unprofessional in their management of assessing risk levels from a cloud of volcanic ash covering Europe, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said Monday in Paris.

“There has been no risk assessment, no consultation, no coordination and no leadership,” IATA head Giovanni Bisignani told journalists in the French capital.

Airspaces must be reopened quickly, as soon as facts based upon tests are available, he said.

The Icelandic Met Office Monday morning said the plume of ash from the volcano near the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier was “much lower” at an altitude of around three km with some cloud at 5.2 km. Last week the highest levels were at some 11 km.

However, it was too early to say if the change was just due to stronger winds, the agency said.

Several countries including Norway, Sweden, Finland, Austria and the Czech Republic Monday re-opened parts or all their airspace. Restrictions for international flights were still in place.

German meanwhile extended its airspace closure until 2 a.m. (0530 IST) Tuesday.

Over 1,000 of the 5,250 flights scheduled to operate between Spain and affected north European countries were cancelled Monday.

Spain earlier said it would offer its airports as a hub for transatlantic flights, Infrastructure Minister Jose Blanco said.

Several governments also discussed alternative means of transporting stranded travellers.

Britain will deploy Royal Navy ships to repatriate hundreds of thousands of stranded travellers, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said after a meeting of the emergency planning committee Cobra.

Airlines and travel operators also continued their efforts to offer alternatives. Finnish carrier Finnair said land transports would replace flights from Helsinki to Berlin Monday and Tuesday.

Passengers were to travel by ferry to neighbouring Estonia and continue by bus to Berlin - a 34-hour journey.

Several airlines, such as Air France, KLM and Lufthansa, conducted test flights at the weekend and found the ash caused no harm to the performance of their aircraft. KLM said Sunday that its tests had found that European airspace was “safe”.

In Norway, Bjorn Kjos, founder of low-cost airline Norwegian, who has also been critical of the massive closure of airspace, Monday welcomed the decision to reopen Norwegian airspace.

Kjos told broadcaster NRK that planes were on standby to fly stranded passengers home from Italy and Spain.

The IATA particularly criticised Europe’s methodology of closing airspace based on theoretical modeling of the ash cloud.

“This means that governments have not taken their responsibility to make clear decisions based on facts,” Bisignani said. “Instead, it has been the air navigation service providers who announced that they would not provide service.

He said that airlines were losing at least 200 million dollars a day in lost revenues and the airspace shutdown was costing the European economy “billions of dollars in lost business.”

The European reaction to the ash cloud was unprecedented.

“We have seen volcanic activity in many parts of the world, but rarely has it resulted in airspace closures - and never at this scale,” Bisignani said. “When Mount St Helens erupted in the US in 1980, we did not see large-scale disruptions, because the decisions to open or close airspace were risk managed with no compromise on safety.”

According to the Airports Council International, some 6.8 million passengers have been stranded at 313 airports around the world because of measures taken in response to the ash cloud.