Travelers arrive and check in at London Heathrow Airport terminal 5
Iceland's volcanic ash cloud is still hovering over Europe, but planes are back in the sky, passengers are returning home, and airports are bustling again. As airlines work to clear their backlogs, what are the lessons to be learned from the six-day travel ban and the chaos that followed?
Should European officials have acted faster?
There are no modern-day precedents for an ash cloud — made of fine, abrasive bits of rock and volcanic glass — covering much of Europe. And the guidelines set out by the International Civil Aviation Organization, the U.N. body based in Montreal that makes recommendations on minimum air safety rules, put a zero tolerance limit on any concentration of volcanic ash. But recriminations have already begun over the long wait to reopen Europe's airspace. "I think it's fair to say that we were too cautious — 'we' being the international safety regulation community," British Transport Secretary Lord Adonis told BBC radio on April 21. By contrast, U.S. airlines have the power to decide individually whether or not to fly based on scientific evidence and recommendations by the Federal Aviation Authority. Top European Commission transport official Matthias Ruete has signaled that Europe should move in that direction.
Europe's caution is partly linked to the so-called precautionary principle which underpins most European Union environmental and health legislation, and calls for preemptive action if scientists spot a credible hazard — an approach that explains the E.U.'s bans on GMOs and hormone-treated beef. "The E.U. does have more of a culture of caution, and an onus on industry to prove there is no risk," says Marco Incerti, Head of Communications at the Center for European Policy Studies, a Brussels-based think tank. "But that reflects public opinion: people want the authorities to take decisions based on safety."
Should the E.U. set up a single authority to deal with issues like this?
Many angry passengers blamed the chaos on Brussels bureaucrats overreacting. But far from wielding too much power, the E.U. in fact had too little authority to deal with the ash crisis: each nation makes its own decision on whether to open and shut airspace and ground flights (although all the authorities were relying on the same source of information, a single computer simulation produced by the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in London). Eurocontrol, the 38-nation Brussels-based agency that co-ordinates aviation safety in Europe, said it was time to "move towards a harmonized European approach" in dealing with potentially costly and disruptive flight restrictions. Without a unifying air traffic authority to steer them through the chaos, national air transport officials had to coordinate among themselves to plan routes and grant permission for flights to cross one another's airspace.
The crisis could therefore give impetus to the Single European Sky initiative, a long-term plan to tackle the chaos and congestion in Europe's skies with a unified air traffic control system. And E.U. Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas is expected to fast-track E.U. proposals for a European network manager, a person to co-ordinate everything that happens in European airspace.
Should the airlines get a bailout?
The crisis has cost the airline industry $1.7 billion, making it worse than 9/11 in economic terms, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). "I am the first one to say that this industry does not want or need bailouts," said IATA's director general Giovanni Bisignani on April 21. "But this crisis is not the result of running our business badly." Olivier Jankovec, Director General of the European airport trade body ACI Europe was more explicit, saying, "The embattled state of our industry now calls for a European Aviation Relief Plan."
Webster O'Brien, aviation expert at Boston-based consultancy Simat Helliesen & Eichner, says the airline business is very exposed and susceptible to the slightest shock. "It is easy to forget that the air transport system is a flow system," he says. "And if you interrupt it, that causes a huge back-up and [the system] cannot handle it." Indeed, the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation has coined the phrase Constant Shock Syndrome to describe the relentless hits that the aviation industry has taken, from 9/11 and the H1N1 bird flu virus, to rising oil prices and economic downturn.
But, says Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at Cambridge University, the ash cloud is a hit the industry should have seen coming. "Because of the known risk of Icelandic volcanism to aviation in one of the world's busiest air corridors, airports and airlines have surely been aware of the problem for a long time," he says in an email. "It would be unreasonable to claim that this was a completely unforeseeable."