Dust has yet to settle for air travellers
“We’re probably facing a summer of uncertainty due to this ash cloud,” said Eamonn Brennan, chief executive of the IAA.
North-easterly winds over the volcano “can blow ash over Ireland and disrupt air traffic there in the days to come,” said Helga Ivarsdottir, a meteorologist at the Icelandic Met Office. “The forecast for the end of the week and early next week indicates a stronger wind, which can have a greater effect.”
While Met Eireann remains non-committal on the prospect of furthers disruption, the IAA believes we have not seen the last of the problem.
Asked about the prospect of further volcanic ash over Ireland during the summer, a spokesperson for Met Eireann said it had “nothing much to say on that”.
However, forecaster Siobhán Ryan said the likelihood was that the ash would remain a problem for Ireland at least into the weekend, and probably beyond.
“It depends on what happens, day to day,” she said. “A north-easterly wind is not necessarily the worst scenario for us. It depends on the plumes from the volcano and if it continues to erupt.”
The IAA’s chief executive was less circumspect with his forecast of what is to come. Mr Brennan said the threat of travel disruption would remain for a number of months, threatening the holiday plans of tens of thousand of Irish families.
Phillip Hughes, the authority’s director of training, agrees. “This situation is likely to rumble on for a period of months and will cause intermittent problems from time to time.
“We are south-east of Iceland, which means we are the first stop on the way. It depends on the weather. If, for instance, we get a typical Irish summer with prevailing south-westerly winds, we will be OK. If, however, we get a lot of high pressure with northerly-winds – in other words, the good summer we all hoped for, then we could see further disruption if the volcano continues to erupt.
“The whole thing is unprecedented. The shutdown of air traffic last month was the first time since the 1940s that the United States was cut off from trans-Atlantic air traffic.”
The Eyjafjallajokull volcano seems to have a mind of its own and, according to an Irish expert, and it is hard to predict how it will continue to behave.
“Over the past 100 years or so, Icelandic volcanic eruptions have not gone on for very long but they do tend to last weeks, if not months,” said Prof John Gamble of the Geology Department at University College Cork.
“It is the coincidence of ongoing eruption and climatic conditions that is bringing the ash here. It is not really ash, but tephra, dispersed ash with the consistency of fine pepper, allowing it to be carried away in the plume and difficult for a pilot to see with the naked eye. The dispersion of it is determined by the height of the eruption plume above the volcano and its intensity.”
Even though emissions from the volcano have been low during recent days, a north-easterly wind pushed the plume over Ireland and the Scottish Isles, forcing the closure of airports.
Iceland’s meteorological office said a change of wind direction in the past few days had sent the ash cloud south and south-east toward Europe, rather than northward. The ash exceeded the safe level agreed by Europe’s civil aviation authorities in the wake of the six-day shutdown in April.
Based on the new regime imposed in Europe last month, officials had no choice but to impose a no-fly zone and a 60-mile buffer zone, which closed all Irish airports, north and south of the border yesterday.
The agreement to restrict no-fly zones to Ireland and parts of the UK has as much to do with mathematics as safety. Less than 200 flights a day would be expected in and out of Ireland, compared with around 28,000 throughout Europe.
During last month’s crisis Eyjafjallajokull shut down European airspace for six days, more than 100,000 flights were cancelled and the airlines lost an estimated $1.7 billion(€1.3bn). The reopening of European airports only came after aircraft and engine manufacturers changed their advice on commercial jets’ ability to withstand contamination from volcanic ash clouds.
Airlines were allowed to reinstate flights after new guidelines allowed aircraft to fly through low-density ash clouds.
Under the new regime, swathes of UK airspace that were no-go areas for six days were designated as safe for passenger flights. Carriers such as British Airways strongly criticised Europe’s aviation authorities for overreacting to the ash cloud last month and wreaking havoc on hundreds of thousands of travellers, as well as inflicting financial hardship on airlines.
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