kerouac

Even if you are not going to Iceland or Scotland or any of the areas most affected by the volcanic ash, if you have any flights planned over the next couple of days, you'll need to pay very close attention to them. Right now, British, Belgium, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish airspace are apparently all closed. CDG airport in Paris will also be closing down tonight almost certainly.

Even if the airports reopen tomorrow, none of the planes or flight crews are at the correct location -- so they will not be operating normally. Bon voyage!

pavot

Oh great.

For a traveler like me, naturally prone to unnecessary worries, volcanic ash isn't one I'd thought of before.

Time to update my list.

Palenque

What if Obama had been in Prague say yesterday and was to return by Air Force One today - wonder if even POTUS would be stranded by this Icelandic smoke and ask?

Military planes grounded?

kerouac

At the moment, there will be no flights arriving or leaving from the 25 airports of northern France before 10am tomorrow at the earliest. Wind patterns are under scrutiny.

PatrickLondon

>>Military planes grounded?<<

Presumably, yes, unless the little green men decide to invade. Doesn't matter what sort of plane it is or who's on board, once the ash gets into the engines.

Alec

Emergency flights are exempt from flying ban. I'd assume military planes would qualify.

maitaitom

Here is a link to a story about BA Flight 9 in June of 1982. I saw a television special about this flight. It was fascinating. The captain has one of the great quotes in airline history when he tells the passengers of the problem. I flew from Boston to L.A. this morning and had wondered why flights to Heathrow had been canceled. Now I know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9

kerouac

It was interesting at Gare du Nord tonight, where I was picking up my long reserved rental car from Europcar. Normally, that takes me 10 minutes, but tonight it took an hour and a half. All of the car rental counters were full at first, but then National-Alamo, Avis and Hertz were totally cleaned out of cars and put up signs to that effect. Only Europcar is big enough to still have a little leeway on such days, although of course they were serving the customers with reservations first and announcing to the others that they would be dependent on what cars were returned through the evening.

Most of the renters were Italian and Spanish and seemed to be thrilled to pay the 400€ international drop-off charge. They were planning on driving to Milan or Barcelona or Madrid or Rome through the night -- many after having taken the Eurostar from London, to at least get to the continent -- and quite a few were negotiating shared trips with each other, but often the amount of luggage was a problem, since there was no guarantee on the size of the cars that could be rented.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that while people are wringing their hands over the gigantic losses of the airlines, nobody has been mentioning how the car rental companies have been raking it in the past couple days. On top of that, a lot of people who were turned away were directed to the Eurolines bus terminal, which will also be making a fortune in the coming days.

And an hell of a lot of holidays are being ruined...