The Icelandic volcano eruption is still causing significant travel disruptions in Europe, and looking to get worse. The news is covered with stories of entire countries closing their airspace for the first time, photos of stranded travelers in airports, stories of people taking taxis from England to Switzerland – all sounds bad. Even RelEng is impacted by these flight disruptions: we’re all meeting in Toronto this week, but sadly Rail is stuck in Moscow.
This picture from flightradar24.com posted a more understandable summary of the scale of the disruption. The combination of flight data with maps summed up the situation in a very intuitive way, and I really liked how they did this. Nice job, flightradar24.com .
(Oh, and before you ask why close entire country airspace for “some dust”, you should check out the stories about BritishAirways Flight#9 and KLM Flight#867 during other volcanic eruptions. Both ended well, but still…)
Watch this space – at some point focus of news will shift from the flight and economic disruption of this eruption to how this will change weather patterns.
yeah 🙁 show that Nature is still the leading force in the world and something that we can’t control even with all the technology we have now.
This all can take a long time till its “fixed” on the north-Atlantic Routes 🙁