London, England (CNN) -- A cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano stymied European air traffic and choked international travel on Saturday as airlines cut flights, left stranded passengers, and watched their daily revenue nosedive.
Thousands of flights have been canceled. European air traffic officials said 5,000 flights took place instead of the customary number of 22,000 on Saturday. About 10,400 flights took place in Europe on Friday, compared with the normal 28,000.
You may remember the clip I posted last week about the global air traffic (here's a link to the YouTube page so you can see the whole wide shot). Watch it again and note how much travel goes near Iceland. Ash is pretty much cutting off that whole corridor. It's also drifting over Northern Europe as a whole and causing lots of trouble.
I was out of work on Wed and Thur of this week so I only got involved yesterday. Most of my calls were from people scheduled to fly over this weekend. The airlines keep trying to roll passengers back a few days but no one really knows when the schedule will open back up again. At least with a hurricane or a blizzard you know that after a few days of bad weather, things will open back up. Volcanoes don't keep such tidy schedules. This could be an ongoing problem for weeks or months.
To give a window into the travel agent world, the talk yesterday was comparing Europe's sudden no fly conditions to 9/11. We'd talk about how planes were wildly out of position and people were scrambling to get back home somehow. (And then sheepishly we'd add that there was at least the difference that thousands hadn't been killed and the world hadn't really changed.)
One other thing, Americans could usually drive home somehow. One of the people I talked to after 9/11 rented a car and drove from San Diego to Philly to make it home for his son's birthday. Driving from Paris to Pittsburgh isn't really an option. Still, if you're going to get stranded someplace, there are worse spots . . .
3 comments:
Lots of cancellations at work for travel. At least we don't have to worry about delayed flights because of Obama like I was delayed in Prague a couple weeks ago.
Trying to imagine how the world would change if this lasted for a month or longer. It would be devestating to the world economy and it could totally happen.
Well, it'd definitely change the economy around. It's a tough time for airlines and this won't help. I wonder if some kind of filter can be rigged.
I was glad to hear that they canceled Obama's trip to Poland. Just not worth risking some kind of accident.
It was interesting to hear that Chancellor Merkel's trip was canceled as well; you'd think there'd be train service between the two nations that could handle such matters.
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