THE AVIATION PAPER

Officials state that the European skies are safe after KLM's test flight, but a shift in wind direction can cause more problems. Apparentely, this volcano continues to erupt and some scientists believe it will continue to do so for a year or two...interesting. Just when the airline industry started to improve.

 

Over 3000 Americans would disagree...

 

Amen......

 

No Comparison! Never forget! I will never forget that horrible day.

 

Context.

The question isn't about the loss of life or the suffering. it's about the longterm affect on the industry if this volcano keeps clogging the skies over Europe.

 

Personally I think its time for a Global War on Plate-Tectonics.

 

Agreed, but it still is not even close for the U.S. Flag Carriers, and has almost zero affect on U.S. domestic Carriers. So far this might be comparable to a massive winter storm. Now if its the same in a week or two it will go beyond that level, but still probably not approach 9-11 which crushed air travel for months if not years.

Now the affects on British Airways and some of the European Carriers is hard to compare directly to 9-11 so I will leave that analysis to any of the Forumites from the "other side of the pond."

Scoop

 

To put some numbers on it, US carriers are canceling roughly 280 flts a day right now. I don't know how many depatures a day airlines had around 9/11, but I would guess it was a few tens of thousands. (Flight aware has tracked roughly 39,000 arrivals in us airspace in the last 24 hours. Granted some of those were coporate/private aircraft etc.)

European carriers normally operate about 20,000 depatures a day, and right now are only operating about 4000 of those. They hope to be back up in the 10 - 12,0000 range tomorrow.

So, its probably comparable to 9/11 for European carriers, though its not a complete and total system shutdown - though once the cloud is gone, so is the problem, which was not true of 9/11. For US carriers that serve europe, it probably puts a dent in the revenue stream, but likely not a gigantic one. For those that don't serve Europe or codeshare there, probably little to no effect.

 

Short term not as bad as 9/11, which included a complete economic meltdown which had even worse industry ramifications than the grounding.

But this has the potential to really screw the global economy if it continues for weeks or months unabated. Although I assume they could do some experimenting and come up with some mitigation plans to track the exact extent and severity of the cloud at any given time in order to allow some flights to go. Right now they are canxing everything out of an abundance of caution.

 

They can fly lower, if I ran the airline, I would charge a 1,000 per person surcharge to go tomorrow, and if the flight fills, which I bet it would with supply/demand, run it and pay to run a jet engine at 20k ft till u get far enough you can go higher


Also they have a huge mass transit system, fly them into Spain and train them to LHR or wherever