A vast, high-altitude cloud of volcanic ash continued to spread over northern Europe on Friday as airspace and Europe’s busiest airports remained closed and thousands of flights and millions of passengers around the world — from North America to Asia — were affected.
Passengers were stranded at Arlanda Airport outside Stockholm, Sweden, on Thursday.
Eurocontrol, the European air navigation agency, said the cloud’s impact “will continue for at least the next 24 hours,” The Associated Press reported. British aviation authorities said there would be no flights over British airspace until early Saturday morning. In the latest restrictions, Germany’s civil aviation authority said Friday that at least 12 of the country’s 16 airports were closed — including Frankfurt, a major hub for Lufthansa; as well as Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, Dortmund, Cologne, Leipzig, Münster-Osnabrück and Berlin.
News reports quoted German air traffic controllers as saying it was difficult to predict when normal flights would resume. The massive plume, caused by the eruption Wednesday of a glacial volcano in Iceland, drifted slowly eastward on Friday over central Europe and western Russia.
While satellite photographs from above showed the cloud to be dark and menacing, it remained largely invisible for many people on the ground in Europe. Made up of minute particles of silicate that can disable jet engines, the cloud forced the closure of some of the world’s busiest airports on Thursday and Friday, including Heathrow and Gatwick in Britain, Charles de Gaulle and Orly in Paris, as well as hubs in Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/world/europe/17ash.html
No comments:
Post a Comment