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By SLOBODAN LEKIC and CARLO PIOVANO, Associated Press Writers Slobodan Lekic
And Carlo Piovano, Associated Press Writers 48 mins ago
BRUSSELS European airports sent thousands of planes into the sky Thursday
after a week of unprecedented disruptions, but shifting winds sent a new plume
of volcanic ash over Scandinavia, forcing some airports in Norway and Sweden to
close again.
The new airspace restrictions applied to northern Scotland and parts of
southern Norway, Sweden and Finland, said Kyla Evans, spokeswoman for
Eurocontrol, the European air traffic agency.
But nearly all of the continent's 28,000 other scheduled flights, including
more than 300 flights on lucrative trans-Atlantic routes, were expected to
proceed. Every plane was packed, however, as airlines squeezed in some of the
hundreds of thousands of travelers who had been stranded for days among
passengers with regular Thursday tickets.
Airlines said there was no quick solution to cut down the backlog of
passengers, for most flights were nearly full anyway, and no other planes were
available.
"Quite frankly we don't have an answer to this," said David Henderson,
spokesman for the Association of European Airlines.
Some passengers got a break. Authorities chartered a luxury cruise ship the
Celebrity Eclipse to pick up 2,200 tourists in the northern Spanish port of
Bilbao on Thursday and bring them back to England. A British Royal Navy ship
arrived in Portsmouth late Wednesday, carrying 440 troops coming home from
Afghanistan and 280 civilians back from Bilbao.
Many planes flying between the United States and Europe were assigned flight
paths above the ash cloud that still covered the area east of Iceland. Flying
at over 35,000 feet kept the planes well above the current maximum altitude of
the ash, which lingered at 20,000 feet.
The Swedish aviation authority said airspace is still open over the capital
Stockholm, but closed over the southern cities of Goteborg and Malmo. Spokesman
Bjorn Stenberg said changing winds meant the ash cloud over Sweden hadn't
dispersed as forecast.
Meanwhile, new ash clouds were blowing in over western Norway, where Stavanger
and Bergen airports were closed.
The weeklong airspace closures caused by the ash threat to aircraft represented
the worst breakdown in civil aviation in Europe since World War II. This led to
the cancellations of more than 100,000 flights, with airlines on track to lose
over $2 billion.
The aviation crisis that began with an April 14 volcanic explosion left
millions of passengers in limbo, and the uncoordinated closures of airspace by
national governments sparked calls a the wholesale reform of Europe's air
traffic management system.
In Iceland itself, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano threw magma chunks the size of
cars into the air on Wednesday and sent powerful shock waves into the air as an
Associated Press reporter, photographer and television crew flew over in a
helicopter.
In a black crater in the middle of a glacier, red magma thrashed about,
propelling steaming blobs of lava onto the surrounding ice. Every so often
charges of gas which surge from deep inside the mountain through the magma
and cause tremors 15 miles (25 kilometers) away exploded in a fireworks show
of molten rock. The air shivered with a constant, menacing growl, like a
perpetual clap of thunder.
Bolts of lightning shot through the fumes and an eerie glow pervaded the pit of
fire.
In response to the flight disruptions, the European Union said it was stepping
up work on a new management system known as the "Single European Sky" that will
largely erase national borders in the sky.
The volcanic ash crisis "exposed serious flaws and that is something that
probably cannot be ignored much longer," EU spokeswoman Helen Kearns said.
The EU has 27 national air traffic control networks, 60 air traffic centers and
hundreds of approach centers and towers. The airspace is a jigsaw puzzle of
more than 650 sectors.
In contrast, the U.S. air traffic management system is twice as efficient. On
any given day, it manages twice the number of EU flights for a similar cost but
from only about 20 control centers.
European governments and civil aviation authorities defended their decisions to
ground fleets and close the skies and later to reopen them against heated
accusations by airline chiefs that the decisions were based on flawed data or
unsubstantiated fears.
The International Air Transport Association has called on the EU to quickly
compensate airlines for lost revenue, much like the U.S. government did
following the 9/11 terror attacks.
IATA also called for the EU's stringent passenger rights regulations which
force airlines to pay for hotels and meals costs in cases of routine flight
delays to be relaxed to reflect the extraordinary nature of the crisis.
Military aviation also was partly paralyzed, although NATO took the precaution
of moving its Boeing E-3A early warning radar planes to southern Italy. From
there they were able to conduct high-altitude surveillance missions considered
critical to the alliance's air defenses.
"Military flying within the UK was brought to a complete halt other than
search-and-rescue sorties," said Glenn Sands from Air Forces Monthly, a
specialized British publication.
"For those undergoing pilot training ... the ash cloud has caused a significant
delay in their training schedule resulting in the next class of pilots
graduating ceremony being moved back by a number of weeks."
___
Lekic is an AP aviation writer based in Brussels. Piovano reported from
Iceland. Associated Press writers Robert Wielaard in Brussels and Malin Rising
in Stockholm also contributed to this report.