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Airlines toted up losses topping $2 billion and
struggled to get hundreds of thousands of travelers back home
Wednesday after a week of crippled air travel, as questions and
recriminations erupted over Europe's chaotic response to the
volcanic ash cloud.


      Civil aviation authorities defended their decisions to ground
fleets and close the skies - and later to reopen them - against
heated charges by airline chiefs that the decisions were based on
flawed data or unsubstantiated fears.


      The aviation crisis sparked by a volcanic eruption in Iceland
left millions in flightless limbo, created debilitating losses for
airlines and other industries and even threatened Europe's economic
recovery. 


An aviation group called the financial fallout worse than
the three-day worldwide shutdown after the 2001 terrorist attacks
in the United States.


      It was a lesson in mankind's dependency on air travel, the
vulnerability of a vital industry, and the confusion that can ensue
when each nation decides for itself how to handle a problem that
crosses borders.

      The air space over most of Europe opened Wednesday after the
vast, invisible ash-laden cloud dispersed to levels deemed safe.
Restrictions remained over parts of Britain, Ireland, France and
the Scandinavian countries.


      Electronic boards in Europe's biggest hubs - London's Heathrow,
Paris' Charles de Gaulle and Germany's airport at Frankfurt -
showed about 80 percent of flights on schedule as airlines began
filling vacant seats with those who had been stranded for days. But
with 102,000 flights scrapped worldwide over the last week, it
could take over a week to get everyone home.


      In Iceland, the volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier remained active Wednesday - throwing
magma chunks the size of cars into the air, bubbling lava and
producing tremors. But it was not shooting ash and smoke four to
six miles into the air as it did previously.


      "There is much, much less ash production and the plume is
low," said Gudrun Nina Petersen, meteorologist at the Icelandic
Met Office, adding that mild winds kept the ash away from crowded
air flight corridors.


      But scientists at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology said
an initial analysis of samples collected over Zurich last weekend
by special weather balloons concluded that safety concerns were
warranted and the volcano could be getting more dangerous.


      The concentration of particles was "very high" at up to 600
micrograms per cubic meter, according to professor Thomas Peter.


      The composition of the volcanic magma also appeared to be
changing into a form that could become more explosive. Peter Ulmer,
a professor of petrology, said the magma has been gaining in
silicate content.


      If it continues, or if the nearby Katla volcano also erupts,
"this could lead to the most feared of all eruptions: A Plinian
eruption," Ulmer said.


      That kind of eruption is named for Pliny the younger, who
witnessed the devastating of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that destroyed
Pompeii. Such an event could last for weeks or months, he said.

      Civil aviation officials said their decision to reopen terminals
where thousands of weary travelers had camped out was based on
science, not on the undeniable pressure put on them by the
airlines.

      "The only priority that we consider is safety. We were trying
to assess the safe operating levels for aircraft engines with
ash," said Eamonn Brennan, chief executive of Irish Aviation
Authority.

      "It's important to realize that we've never experienced in
Europe something like this before," he told the AP. "We needed
the four days of test flights, the empirical data, to put this
together and to understand the levels of ash that engines can
absorb."


      Despite their protests, the timing of some reopenings seemed
dictated by airlines' commercial pressures.


      British Airways raised the stakes in its showdown with aviation
authorities Tuesday by announcing it had more than 20 long-haul
planes in the air and wanted to land them in London. 


Despite being
told the air space was firmly shut, radar tracking sites showed
several BA planes circling in holding patterns over England late
Tuesday before the somewhat surprising announcement that air space
was to be reopened.


      "We were circling for about two hours," said Carol
Betton-Dunn, 37, a civil servant who was on the first flight to
land at Heathrow, from Vancouver.


      She said passengers were initially told the flight would be
going to London, then that it was heading for an unspecified
European airport, then that Shannon airport in western Ireland
would be their destination.


      "It's been exhausting," Betton-Dunn said.


      BA chief executive Willie Walsh said by Tuesday it had become
clear the lockdown was excessive.


      "I don't believe it was necessary to impose a blanket ban on
all U.K. airspace last Thursday," he said. "My personal belief is
that we could have safely continued operating for a period of
time."


      KLM Royal Dutch Airlines also sent aircraft toward Amsterdam
before Dutch air space officially reopened, said Edwin van Zwol,
president of the Dutch Pilots Association.


      Lufthansa demanded and received a waiver from German authorities
that allowed them to bring 15,000 passengers back to Germany on
Tuesday, flying at low altitude. Other Germany-based airlines also
received waivers, for a total of 800 flights, even though German
airspace was not officially opened until Wednesday.


      Van Zwol, a veteran Boeing 777 captain, was critical of European
authorities for failing to consult with the airlines or pilots.


      "They put all the experts on the sidelines," he said.
"(Airlines) are used to this. They deal with volcanic situations
all over the world on a daily basis, so they are quite capable of
making decisions."


      The European decision to partially reopen airspace did not come
until the fifth day of the crisis, when transport ministers of the
affected states met by teleconference. The plan carved up the sky
into relative zones of safety where the flight ban remained in
place or was lifted according to the concentration of ash.

      Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary slammed that slow
response.


      "It might have made sense to ground flights for a day or two.
That's understandable. But there should have been a much faster
response by the governments, the transport ministers and the
regulators," he told The Associated Press on Wednesday.


      But Tomio Okamura of the Association of Czech Travel Agents said
despite huge losses his industry was happier being safe than sorry.


      "It would be much bigger a catastrophe for us in case of any
passenger plane crash. That would have a fatal, long-term
consequences for the industry," Okamura said in Prague.


      In Berlin, Giovanni Bisignani, the head of the International Air
Transport Association, called the economic fallout "devastating"
and urged European governments to compensate airlines for lost
revenues like the U.S. government did following the 9/11 terror
attacks.

      At one stage, he said 29 percent of global aviation and 1.2
million passengers a day were affected by the airspace closures.
Airlines were on track to lose $2.2 billion, he said.


      Amid the sniping and bickering, tens of thousands of travelers
remained stuck and anxious to get home.


      Bob and Maureen Hixon from Boston had been in London since
Friday but could only get seats out next weekend. So they went to
in Heathrow hoping for an earlier flight, concerned about their
children and their 93-year-old mother.


      "I have never been worried about flying in my life before
today," said Hixon, a 55-year-old mortgage broker. "But I'm not
thinking about that. I'm just thinking about getting home."


      But uncertainty still remained about the safety of the volcanic
debris.


      The Finnish Air Force said volcanic ash dust was found in the
engine of an F-18 Hornet jet but it caused no significant damage.
Officials said "contaminants on its inside surfaces" of the
fighter-bomber's engine would be further analyzed.
    


  A test flight by the German Aerospace Center found ash over
eastern Germany that was comparable in density to a plume of dust
above the Saharan desert. The center reported no damage to the
airplane.

      A French weather service plane also took samples of the air
Tuesday and found no volcanic ash problems.


      Those results appeared to contradict the potentially dire
conclusions by the Swiss scientists.


      Still the crisis may jolt the European Union to step up plans to
eliminate borders in the sky that have endured unchallenged 50
years after they began melting away on the ground.
    

  The flaws in the system, in which each country maintains
sovereignty over its own airspace, "cannot be ignored much
longer," said EU spokeswoman Helen Kearns.
      

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.


      Anthony Concil, a spokesman for IATA industry group, said the
system was "a continuing disaster."
     


 "For decades the industry has been asking for a single European
sky. The economic and social costs of the uncoordinated approach to
this crisis by Europe is the biggest argument ever" for that," he
said.


      At the port of Bilbao in northern Spain, more than 2,000 weary
Britons packed a ferry Wednesday and headed for England.

      The ferry, which normally takes 1,000 people on a 30-hour trip
to Portsmouth in southern England, carried around 2,200 people this
time and asked strangers to share sleeper cabins.
      

Sam Gunn, 42, from Birmingham endured two hungry days sleeping
at JFK Airport in New York after his flight home to England was
canceled. He settled for a flight to Madrid, then caught a long bus
up to Bilbao to reach the ferry.


      "Oh, I've been traveling all over the world," he said,
chuckling.
     

Gallery

Flights to Europe from Twin Cities resuming

Volcano fallout hits Minnesota cultural events

Flight disruptions in Europe get even worse

Airlines toted up losses topping $2 billion and
struggled to get hundreds of thousands of travelers back home
Wednesday after a week of crippled air travel, as questions and
recriminations erupted over Europe's chaotic response to the
volcanic ash cloud.


Recriminations erupt in ash-fueled aviation crisis

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