Airline passengers should be spared disruption from the ash cloud threatening to disrupt UK airspace on Wednesday according to Met Office forecasts, as airlines accused regulatory authorities of mishandling a volcanic eruption for the second time in 13 months.
A dense plume from the Grímsvötn volcano in Iceland that forced the cancellation of more than 250 flights in Scotland and northern England on Tuesday will have dissipated by Wednesday, the Met Office said, aided by volatile weather and less explosive eruptions from Grímsvötn. Scottish airports were the worst affected on Tuesday, accounting for the majority of the 252 cancellations announced by Eurocontrol, the air traffic control body whose members handle about 29,000 flights per day throughout the continent.
A Met Office spokesman said the thickest concentrations of ash, which airlines still cannot fly through, will have drifted across the North Sea by 6am on Wednesday, allowing airlines to resume normal services. “High concentrations of ash will be moving towards Germany, Holland and Denmark.”
The spokesman said windy and wet weather was helping to disperse the particles, unlike last April when the UK was caught in a dead calm of high pressure that prevented dispersal of a cloud from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. “The weather is much more dynamic. There is a succession of high and low pressure areas [creating wind] coming across the Atlantic and there is a lot of rain that tends to wash out the pollutants.” The Met Office rejected claims by Ryanair that it had put out “mythical” weather charts that erroneously placed dense ash clouds over Scotland throughout much of yesterday, citing evidence of ash falls in Glasgow, Kirkwall airport and a ship travelling between Iceland and Scotland. “We have seen lots of evidence from various sources that the ash is present across Scotland and fits in with the computer models that we are running continually. It all points to a presence where we expect to see it.”
Several flights from Newcastle International airport were cancelled on Tuesday, including services to Paris, Brussels, Faro, Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Belfast International and Malta.
Arrivals to Newcastle from Aberdeen, Amsterdam and Exeter have also been cancelled.
Meanwhile, four EasyJet flights to and from Belfast International airport (flights to and from Newcastle and Glasgow) on Tuesday afternoon have been cancelled.
Philip Hammond, the English transport secretary, who has promised there will be no blanket airspace closures similar to last year, suggested on BBC’s Newsnight on Monday that “we have got to learn to live” with disruption, while insisting there were now “much more robust systems to minimise the disruptive effect”.
Since last year’s eruption, the authorities had gained a “much better understanding” of the risk from ash clouds, he said. “Most importantly, the basic situation now is that the threshold for most aircraft is 20 times where it was last year. We have got from 200 micrograms (mcg) per cubic metre to 4,000mcg per cubic metre as the threshold up to which most aircraft can fly.
“What we can’t promise is that there won’t be disruption when there is a major natural event like this.”
Hammond will chair a meeting of the government’s Cobra committee on the ash cloud later on Tuesday. A government source said the situation remained variable, with the possibility that dense ash will drift over Glasgow and Edinburgh between 1pm and 7pm before clearing. The source added: “These things change from hour to hour.”
