As we gazed yesterday into the clear blue skies, we wonder-see end of this article..... whether the close-down of UK aviation in slightly OTT (spool down to about halfway). There is an unmistakable whiff of panic in the Tory camp as the polls show a Lib-Dim surge, claimed by some to be a response to Clegg's debate performance. It has narrowed yet again the Tory lead, down to three of four percent, depending on the poll. ===================================== By DANIEL BOFFEY and JAMES TAPPER The unprecedented air lockdown over Britain has been extended to 1am tomorrow morning, as officials warned that the ominous cloud will hover above the country for at least a week, causing further misery for travellers. Hopes that some flights might have been permitted this weekend were dashed as more dust accumulated in the country’s airspace. Air traffic control company Nats said the ash cloud caused by an erupting Icelandic volcano was continuing to cover the UK so the flight ban had to continue. The volcanic eruptions spewing ash into Britain's skies intensified yesterday as officials warned that the ominous cloud will hover above the country for at least a week A spokesman said: 'The volcanic ash cloud from Iceland shows continued and extensive cover of the UK. 'Based on the latest information from the Met Office, Nats advises that the restrictions currently in place across UK controlled airspace will remain in place until at least 1900 (UK time) today, Sunday April 18.' A spokesman for airport operator BAA said: 'Following the latest advice from Nats, all flights to and from all BAA airports are suspended until 7pm today at the earliest. 'Passengers should not travel to these airports until further notice and should remain in touch with their airlines. 'We appreciate the continued patience of passengers at this difficult time and will provide updates as often as possible.' The continued ban on flights came as an Icelandic geologist warned 'there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.' 'The activity has been quite vigorous overnight, causing the eruption column to grow,' Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson said yesterday. Dutch geologist Edwin Zanen, who is in Iceland observing the volcano, agreed that there was 'no sign' that the volcano was calming down. 'On the contrary, we can see that at this moment it's extraordinarily active,' he said. The volcano, pictured here yesterday, is still causing disruptions to air passengers and is set to cause further misery for travellers into next week Volcanologists have warned that the eruptions from Mount Eyjafjallajokull could continue for months. And officials said airlines would continue to be subject to restrictions for as long as ash billows into British airspace. Graeme Leitch of the Met Office said a change in the wind direction might mean flight restrictions could be lifted but there was no indication that any such change was imminent. Forecaster Paul Knightley of MeteoGroup predicted the continued activity could herald 'quite a prolonged spell of problems' in the UK, continuing until Friday. Dr Dougal Jerram, of Durham University's Department of Earth Sciences, said: 'We know when things are going to happen, what is difficult to predict or understand is how long a volcanic eruption is going to go on for. Some are relatively short-lived, but some are months long.' The Prince of Wales and Foreign Secretary David Miliband last night cancelled their plans to travel to Krakow today for the funeral of Poland's President Lech Kaczynski. US president Barack Obama also said he would be unable to attend. The Duchess of Cornwall has already had to cancel a visit to a Polish cultural centre in London to sign a book of condolence for the late president because she was unable to fly from Scotland. British Airways have cancelled all long and short-haul flights in and out of the UK today. A spokesman said: 'We are keeping our flying schedule under constant review and will aim to give customers as much notice as possible once we receive more information from Nats.' Budget carrier Ryanair has cancelled all its scheduled flights to and from the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, northern France, northern Germany, Poland and the Baltic States until 1pm tomorrow and easyJet said it was cancelling all flights to and from northern Europe Air Ambulance services have also been forced to ground their helicopters across Britain amid fears that the lowering ash level would interfere with flying. And the Met Office warned that there was growing evidence of ash falling to the ground, which will raise concerns of a health risk for children and the elderly. With the prospect of days under the cloud of ash, pilots and aviation officials sought to dodge the dangerous grit by adjusting altitude levels. Germany's airspace ban allows for low-level flights to go ahead under so-called visual flight rules, in which pilots don't rely on their instruments. Lufthansa took advantage of that to fly 10 empty planes to Frankfurt from Munich on Saturday in order to have them in the right place when the restrictions are lifted, airline spokesman Wolfgang Weber said. The planes flew at about 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) – well below their usual altitude – in close coordination with air traffic control. It came as KLM, the Dutch subsidiary of Air France, said it flew a plane through the cloud of volcanic ash last night without suffering any damage. It says initial inspections afterward showed no damage or irregularities from the ash. It now plans to return seven airplanes without passengers to Amsterdam today. 'We hope to receive permission as soon as possible after that to start up our operation and to transport our passengers to their destinations,' said Chief Executive Peter Hartman, who was aboard Saturday's flight. The start of day three of the chaos caused by Eyjafjallajoekull's eruptions saw the scale of the volcano's emissions grow in intensity with a fresh plume of ash being blasted 30,000ft into the air The Swiss looked the other direction – above the ash cloud. The Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation began allowing flights Saturday above Swiss air space as long as the aircraft were at least at 36,000 feet (11,000 meters). It also allowed flights at lower altitudes under visual flight rules, aimed at small, private aircraft. The start of day three of the chaos caused by Eyjafjallajoekull’s eruptions saw the scale of the volcano’s emissions grow in intensity with a fresh plume of ash being blasted 30,000ft into the air. As the day developed, officials at the Met Office confirmed that the new dust – a combination of fine glass and rock – was being blown over the UK where it was settling on top of the cloud created by initial eruptions earlier in the week. A Met Office spokesman said: ‘It is not good news at the moment. There was a brief opening in Scotland when the ash cloud appeared to be moving north west but then the wind brought it south and that is happening now. 'The rest of the ash is static and so we can expect the cloud to be there for some days to come.’ The renewed eruptions added to the chaos caused by the lockdown on flights in much of European airspace announced on Friday evening. Yesterday’s 16,000 commercial flight cancellations across continental Europe caused increased pressure on ferry companies who were already struggling to meet demand. A spokesman for P&O Ferries, which transported 6,000 passengers yesterday, said it was receiving 400 calls every 15 minutes, equivalent to one every two seconds. Dover Harbour Board said the port handled 63,017 passengers, 10,833 cars, 464 coaches and 5,497 freight vehicles – figures which would have been expected in the height of summer, not April. Some travellers came up with novel solutions to the crisis. As room for foot passengers on ferries at Dunkirk ran out, men in business suits were seen buying women’s and children’s bikes so that they could qualify for spaces designated for passengers with bicycles. Tom Noble, 52, from Highgate in North London, said ferry operator Norfolkline had no foot passenger tickets left and would only allow him to make the journey if he was a genuine cyclist. Mr Noble, a managing director, said ferry staff at Dunkirk even made him ride the ‘rustic’ contraption, which he bought from a second-hand shop, up the ramp. The plight of many more travellers was made worse by a national rail strike in France which stopped holidaymakers making their way across the continent by train. And in airports all over the continent yesterday there were scenes of desolation as it became clear that there was no way home. It will keep flying in southern and central Europe, although flight restrictions are being imposed in Hungary and Romania. Thomson Airways, the airline for Thomson and First Choice holidays, said all outbound flights over the weekend had been cancelled while British Airways announced that it was suspending all long and short haul flights in and out of Britain today. A spokesman said: ‘We are keeping our flying schedule under constant review and will aim to give customers as much notice as possible once we receive more information.’ Two British teams are facing potential disruption with Fulham set to travel to Hamburg and Liverpool supposed to be heading to Spain to play Atletico Madrid. At Nice Airport on the French Riviera, easyJet stopped offering accommodation to passengers, telling them they had run out of available rooms. Bupa carer Diane Hodge from Corsham, near Bath, had already spent Friday night in a local hotel with her brother Richard, son Jason and 82-year-old mother, Sybil Bernard. She said: ‘They told us that we could stay there until we actually got a flight but the hotel said we couldn’t stay there any longer this morning. ‘It was a very seedy hotel anyway and I hardly slept a wink. This is very worrying. My mother is quite frail and this was to have been the last time she flew. What a disaster.’ Next to her, partially-sighted Elizabeth Gorman, standing forlornly in a queue for accommodation with her white stick, added: ‘We had planned a month’s holiday with a £600 runabout train ticket but the French railway strikes have ruined all that. So we’ve spent the last 12 days paying £65 a night in Nice. Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris stands empty yesterday while wind continues to blow ash from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull through the skies ‘My husband Richard and I will have spent about £2,000 before this is over. It’s enough to drive you to tears.’ And in Malaga, in southern Spain, mum-of-two Carly Milne, 25, from Liverpool, travelling with partner Robert Yates, 33 and daughters Keira, five, and baby Hally said: ‘I’m panicking because I’ve only got a day’s supply of baby milk left and I can’t find the same milk out here. We’ve been offered an alternative flight a week Monday. ‘Robert was due to start a scaffolding job on Tuesday and he’s going to lose that. He was made redundant before we flew out to Spain two weeks ago so we could really have done with the money ‘EasyJet are putting us up in full-board accommodation but there’s always other costs involved in being abroad.’ Back in Britain’s airports, which would usually be packed with passengers returning from their Easter holidays, there was an eerie quiet. Gatwick Airport should have seen 40,000 passengers catching 250 flights yesterday but instead just a few hundred weary travellers were resigned to another long day waiting in the two terminals. Shops and restaurants remained open but staff stood around largely unemployed as the businesses lost many thousands of pounds. However, comedian John Cleese managed to arrive back in England from Norway yesterday after beating flight disruption with a £3,300 cab journey. He arrived at London’s St Pancras train station after a 15-hour journey which included a 930-mile taxi trip from Oslo to Brussels which he had taken when his flight from Norway was cancelled. Cleese had been a guest on a talk show in Norway when he got caught up in the travel chaos. The Fawlty Towers star finished the last leg of his marathon trip on the Brussels to London Eurostar. He said: ‘I had urgent meetings to attend on Monday. That’s why I did it. Luckily the promoter agreed to pay the cost of the journey.’ The air chaos has provided a welcome windfall for taxi firms across Britain. Staff at Glasgow airport said some passengers had been so desperate to travel that they were taking taxis as far as the south of England. One man yesterday paid £600 to be driven to Gatwick. In Northampton, seven executives, who work for a multinational company, paid Amber Cars its biggest ever fare of £1,200 to drive them from the town to Geneva in Switzerland to catch a flight to Portugal where they had another meeting. London minicab company Addison Lee said it had received requests for journeys to cities as far away as Paris, Milan, Amsterdam and Zurich. Eurostar has also benefited – a spokeswoman said it had laid on eight extra services today and will do the same tomorrow to cope with demand. It expects to have taken more than 50,000 extra passengers between Thursday and tomorrow as a result of the cancelled flights. But Top Gear presenter James May has been branded ‘irresponsible’ by Icelandic police after it emerged that he drove up the erupting volcano in a stunt for the BBC motoring show. May went to Iceland last week in the early stages of the eruption and tried to drive a superjeep over a lava flow – but had to reverse quickly when his tyres caught fire. A safety team was on standby to put out the flames, but last night Sveinn Runarsson, chief superintendent for Hvolsvollur said: ‘We are investigating the matter and we will decide on a penalty by the end of the week. The maximum fine could be up to 300,000 Icelandic Kronur [about £1,500]. ‘This is very dangerous and is encouraging others to do the same. Top Gear talked to the authorities but we didn’t think they would be stupid enough to drive on lava.’ A view of the town of Vik in Iceland: The Met Office has warned that there was growing evidence of ash falling to the ground in the UK Flights between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly were some of the only airborne journeys permitted in Britain yesterday as the planes fly at around 1,500ft – far below the dust cloud. Ironically, the eruption has had little effect on Icelandic airports. Two domestic airports east of the glacier were closed but they reopened once it became clear the ash was travelling towards the UK. Two men died last night when a light airplane crashed in a field in Andover, Hampshire. Police and air accident investigators were at the scene yesterday but a spokesman said that it was too early to say whether there was any link to the cloud of volcanic ash. A police spokesman said: ‘It is too early to say whether ash was a factor but it will form part of the investigation.’ Few could have guessed the impact of eruptions from a volcano 1,000 miles away under the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier in Iceland. Last Wednesday, we found out. At mid-morning, the high-level cloud of volcanic ash had spread across the Atlantic and was approaching Scotland. Flight operations in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow were suspended. By midday the whole of British airspace was closed down. It has remained so ever since. A plume of volcanic ash rises into the atmosphere from a crater under about 200 metres of ice at the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in southern Iceland But now hours have turned into days and, though few are willing to admit it, days could just as easily turn into weeks… or perhaps longer. Thousands of flights have been cancelled, hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded and frustrated. The cost to airlines climbs through the millions of pounds with each passing moment. Tune into the latest updates on-line or on television and there is an inescapable doomsday feel to it all, with graphics of a shadowy mass spreading across the outline of our island. It is something we have, for the most part, simply accepted. After all, this isn’t some work and conditions dispute that can be argued out is it? We just have to sit it out don’t we? Anyone in any doubt of the wisdom or necessity of this nationwide grounding is promptly reminded of what happened to BA Flight 009. That was the jumbo jet en route from Kuala Lumpur to Perth on June 24, 1982, flying at 37,000ft when it suddenly experienced the nightmare scenario of all four engines failing. Pilot Captain Eric Moody glided the jet down more than 20,000ft before he successfully managed to restart one engine at 13,000ft followed by others, before landing safely. The aircraft had flown into a cloud of volcanic ash from the eruption of Mt Galunggung in Indonesia. There are other incidents too that can be cited. On December 15, 1989, a KLM jumbo lost all four engines when it flew into a cloud that turned out to be volcanic ash while descending to Anchorage, Alaska. The engines resumed working and the aircraft landed safely, but badly damaged. BA aircraft are seen parked at Heathrow Airport after hundreds of flights were cancelled by drifting ash In 1991, Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, and more than 20 ‘volcanic ash encounters’ occurred from what was then the largest volcanic eruption of the past 50 years. The ability to predict where ash was to be found was challenging because of the enormous extent of the ash cloud. Commercial flights and various military operations were affected. One US operator grounded its aircraft in Manila for several days. Six years later, when Mt Popocatepetl in Mexico blew, there were several incidents. Although damage was minor in most cases, one flight crew experienced significantly reduced visibility for landing and had to look through the flight deck side windows to taxi after landing. In addition, the airport in Mexico City was closed for up to 24 hours on several occasions during subsequent intermittent eruptions. Each of these incidents was distinct and separate. And the action taken in response was distinct and separate. But that is where a gap begins to emerge between this history marshalled as reason for the current blanket grounding and the situation in which we find ourselves today. It was these incidents that had the international aviation community look at procedures and guidelines in the event of volcanic eruption. One very sensible outcome was to increase observations and reporting. The Galunggung incident had happened simply because no one had warned Captain Moody of the erupting volcano. Had he known about it, he could easily have changed course and avoided it. Over the past few days we have been led to believe that grounding all planes is inevitable. That there is absolutely no alternative. But that just isn’t true. What we are witnessing here is not a natural law, enshrined since time immemorial but a policy drawn up by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and then interpreted and enforced by the UK’s National Air Traffic Service (NATS). And that interpretation requires some scrutiny. In September 2009 the ICAO published their ‘Contingency plan for handling traffic in the event of volcanic ash penetrating the airspace of North Atlantic Region’. The sun sets over the empty airport control tower at Newcastle airport, as an ash cloud grounded all flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded In many respects the guidelines are highly detailed though they make no distinction at all between major or relatively modest eruptions. Nor do they take into account the dilution effect as the cloud spreads from the original point. The only reference is to generic dust clouds, without any attempt to carry out a risk assessment. Using as its model the largest and most dangerous of Icelandic volcanoes, the Katla volcano, it offered a series of procedures for monitoring and tracking volcano ash clouds and ‘advice’ to be given to airlines in the event of a volcano eruption. This current eruption is a relatively modest affair – certainly not at all in the league of Katla. We have been scared into believing that to fly would be madness, but part of the rationale that is keeping us grounded is an economic equation rather than simple personal safety. To fly beneath the cloud until clear of it would mean burning more fuel. But not flying at all is surely burning money more swiftly. Low-flying to simply avoid the danger of ash being sucked into the jet engines is a temporary solution gaining currency on professional pilot’s forum Pprune. One pilot writing there yesterday pointed out: ‘The chances of it even appearing at puddle jumper altitudes is negligible’. It isn’t just daredevil pilots who are beginning to question the necessity of the current stalemate. Steve Wood, Chief Pilot at Sussex and Surrey Air Ambulance, yesterday described the measures being taken as ‘a complete overreaction’. Modern jet aircraft engines are amazingly robust. And indeed they must be so. They have to face not only the hazards of bird strikes, but rain, hail and even salt spray on take-off from coastal airports. All of which can potentially wreak havoc on engines. Furthermore, sand is a common hazard from dust storms and from desert airfields. Some aircraft are better equipped than others to deal with high-dust conditions, and consultation with aircraft and engine manufacturers might have enabled more precise restrictions to be imposed, rather than a blanket ban. But a spokesman for NATS admitted: ‘We don’t really deal with particular manufacturers.’ They were more concerned with ‘applying the international regulations’ rather than working on a specific plane-by-plane, make-by-make basis. The blanket ban under clear blue skies and glorious sunshine is making some wonder whether this ‘one-size-fits-all’ regulation is appropriate to a situation that the regulations did not foresee. And there will be many among the 200,000 Britons currently stranded abroad, who would be quite happy to take the risk. In the final analysis, despite the scares, no one has actually been killed in a volcano incident – something which cannot be said for the much more hazardous drive to the airport. Richard North is co-author of Scared To Death – From BSE To Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth.
ICELAND'S REVENGE THREAD
More astonishingly, the BPIX poll for The Mail on Sunday shows that support for the Lib-Dims has soared to 32 percent, one point ahead of the Conservatives on 31, with Labour trailing third at 28.
This is the first time ever that an opinion poll has ever shown the Lib-Dims in the lead in a general election campaign. The last time the precursor party, the Liberals, actually had the most popular support was in 1906, before opinion polls or television existed.
More to the point, Cameron's strategy of trawling for Lib-Dim votes is in tatters. The chances of the Tories pulling enough votes from that quarter were always slight but now, he is more likely to lose votes to the Lib-Dims than gain them.
That, however, was Cameron's main strategy and so confident was he in its success that he was prepared to alienate his core vote in order to go chasing after his self-declared target constituency. With less than three weeks to go, it is far too late now to change strategies, and the ground is irrecoverable.
In effect, Cameron does not have a Plan B. And a 3-4 percent lead at this stage in an election campaign is seriously bad news, even if the Lib-Dim surge is a temporary blip. We may be on the cusp of seeing Dave's not-the-conservative-party crash and burn.
GENERAL ELECTION THREADAsh cloud will last ‘for another week’:
UK air lockdown extended to 1am tomorrow... and volcano is still erupting
Last updated at 10:18 AM on 18th April 2010More...
As the cloud thickens, some pilots are asking... Why can't we just fly beneath it?
By Richard North
At first it was all rather thrilling. Suddenly, city-dwellers looked up to clear quiet skies, without a vapour trail or a glint of sun hitting metal in sight.
Yet it is worth noting that for even the most serious of foreseen eruptions the plan issued by the IOCA involved re-routing aircraft round, or under, dust plumes.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266852/Ash-cloud-week--Now-layer-fine-dust-settling-ash-cloud--volcano-erupting.html#ixzz0lRWhhyr0