LONDON – Frustrated travelers in Europe expressed fury Monday at transportation officials' inability to clear runways and high-speed train tracks after a snowstorm that has wreaked holiday travel chaos and spawned fears many people won't get home for Christmas.

More than 48 hours after the last heavy snowfall, English authorities continued to struggle to get rid of buildups of snow and ice. The continent's worst bottleneck was London's Heathrow Airport, where thousands of travelers were stranded overnight as flight cancellations increased even as other major European airports resumed normal operations after several days of weather delays.

London Mayor Boris Johnson summed up the exasperation as Britain suffered another day of travel setbacks.

"It can't be beyond the wit of man surely to find the shovels, the diggers, the snowplows or whatever it takes to clear the snow out from under the planes, to get the planes moving and to have more than one runway going," he said as British Airways canceled its Monday short-haul schedule from Heathrow.

Airport operator BAA announced that flights would be greatly reduced at Heathrow until at least 6 a.m. (0600 GMT, 1 a.m. EST) Wednesday, with only a maximum one-third of its scheduled flights allowed to operate.

"Passengers should anticipate further delays and cancellations in the following days and potentially beyond Christmas Day," BAA said in a statement.

It advised passengers to postpone their trips if possible. BAA said the mandated flight restrictions should provide airlines with more "clarity" for planning purposes. The government has allowed nighttime operations to help clear the backlog, BAA said.

BAA said a five-inch snowfall in one hour Saturday left Heathrow blanketed in snow, and subsequent swings in temperature led to an extensive ice buildup around aircraft parked on the ground. BAA said "every available" staff member and several hundred additional contractors are trying to get the airport moving again.

Air traffic control agency Eurocontrol said Monday on its website that the situation at Heathrow had become "chaotic."

Embarrassed British officials promised an inquiry into the poor performance of the transport network, with Transport Secretary Philip Hammond planning to address Parliament about the failures, which included major delays on the Eurostar rail service linking England to France and Belgium.

At Heathrow's sprawling Terminal 5, tired and disgruntled passengers faced lengthy waits without much information.

American Suzie Devoe, 20, was one of many who had spent two nights sleeping on the airport floor in a bid to get home for the holidays. She was desperately trying to rearrange a flight so she could get back to Washington to spend Christmas with her family.

"The whole situation has been a complete nightmare," the Bristol University student said. "I just want to get home, I want to be with my family. But I'm being held in a horrible limbo."

Hundreds of passengers camped overnight in Heathrow terminal buildings after services were canceled or delayed.

The situation worsened Monday after at Terminal 3 when some people holding boarding passes for flights were not even let into the terminal building because it was overcrowded.

Eurostar passengers were also severely affected.

At London's St. Pancras station, frustrated travelers hoping to travel to France and Belgium by train stood in a line that wound through the station, around the outside of the huge building and several hundred yards (meters) down the road.

Many had been there for five hours or more, bundled up in parkas, scarves, gloves and hats against the chill, or clutching cups of tea and coffee from a Salvation Army van that had handed out 2,000 hot drinks since before dawn.

"I have to say they are very goodhearted," said Salvation Army worker Estelle Blake. "I've not seen any nasty comments. They've all been lovely and helping each other out."

People were stoic about the weather, but less forgiving of train operator Eurostar, which broadcast loudspeaker announcements warning people not to travel unless their journey was "absolutely essential." Many said they were getting little other information.

"I think someone is to blame — Eurostar," said Peter Heckmanns, 41, a local government worker trying to get home to Kerkrade in The Netherlands after a weekend in London. "We had some delays because of the weather getting here. Our train was stopped at Ashford and we had to wait on the freezing platform for two hours without a cup of coffee. So we thought, 'The return trip can't be worse.' But it is worse."

Charlie Phillips, who had been trying to get home to his family in the French Alps for three days — first on canceled flights from Gatwick airport, then by train — said no one could be blamed for the weather but that Eurostar failed to keep passengers informed.

"The suspicion is, people know what is happening, and they're not telling us," he said.

The strain was also felt at Brussels Airport, which is facing a shortage of deicing liquid and can't guarantee departures for planes that need deicing until at least midnight Tuesday, the airport said in its Twitter feed.

The airport said that the shortage is due to transportation problems in France, adding that "the weather forecast is not so positive."

In Germany, flight operations were slowed even though Frankfurt airport, the country's biggest, was clear of snow and ice. Officials canceled about 300 flights there, out of about 1,340, because of problems elsewhere in Europe, airport operator Fraport said.

French civil aviation authorities, meanwhile, asked airlines to reduce their flights at the two main Paris airports by 30 percent.

Tempers were on the rise at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport.

Donna Gordon, a stranded Irish traveler, took her complaint directly to French Transport Minister Thierry Mariani who made a trip to the airport to check on passengers.

"We've been here since Saturday at 6 a.m. and our flight keeps saying on time, on time, on time ....," she complained. "I'm standing in the same clothes I've been wearing for three days."

More snow is forecast in some areas of Britain for Monday afternoon, adding to the problems, with British Airways warning of more flight cancellations, particularly in the greater London area, where all airports have been affected.

Winter storms forced British government ministers and bank executives to postpone their meeting on the politically touchy issue of bank bonuses. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills did not announce a new date but said it hoped the meeting could be rescheduled later this week.

Forecasters have said Britain is experiencing some of the most severe winter weather in a century, with continued freezing temperatures and snowfall accumulations expected Monday afternoon and evening.

Experts said the extreme winter weather may be related to climate change due to global warming. After strong early year blizzards — nicknamed Snowmageddon — paralyzed the U.S. mid-Atlantic and record snowfalls hit Russia and China, the temperature turned to broil.

"The extremes are changed in an extreme fashion," said Greg Holland, director of the earth system laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the United States.

For example, even though it sounds counterintuitive, global warming likely played a bit of a role in "Snowmageddon" earlier this year, Holland said. That's because with a warmer climate, there's more moisture in the air, which makes storms including blizzards, more intense, he said.

Airports and British travel industry group ABTA have warned it is almost inevitable that some cancellations and delays will continue through this week and likely snarl those attempting to head away for the holiday season.

British Airways warned passengers not to travel to London's Heathrow airport unless they have a confirmed seat on a flight known to be operating despite the weather problems and the backlog of delays. It urged travelers to consider canceling their flight if possible.

Icy conditions were also hampering travel across Europe, with flights canceled and delayed in multiple countries at the weekend.

In France, Jean Louis Balam, a Dutch passenger who spent the night at Charles de Gaulle airport trying for a second day to get from Paris to Amsterdam, said passengers had to improvise overnight at the airport.

"We went to the airport yesterday evening and we wanted to go to Amsterdam and we waited here about five hours," he told Associated Press Television News. "We had to sleep at the airport because ... hotels were full. "

Blandine Sabadie also found herself sleeping at the airport. She said passengers were escorted to an "improvised" area with portable beds, blankets and warm drinks.

Mariani said on France-Info radio that when a runway is closed for an hour the lost time cannot be reclaimed. "For each hour lost, it is some 70 to 80 flights that you can't recover during the day," he said.

In Germany, flight operations were slowed even though Frankfurt airport, the country's biggest, was clear of snow and ice. Officials canceled almost 400 flights there, out of about 1,340, because of problems elsewhere in Europe, airport operator Fraport said.

In Munich, the country's second-largest airport, 70 flights have been canceled.

While airports were cleared off snow and ice, heavy snowfall overnight led to chaotic road conditions, with massive traffic jams and hundreds of accidents.

Police in North Rhine-Westphalia state counted 1,160 weather-related accidents since midday Sunday that left 70 people injured, 11 of them severely, German news agency DAPD reported.

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Play Video AP  – US warns Americans to be vigilant when in Europe

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MADRID – A rare advisory for U.S. travelers to beware of potential terrorist threats in Europe drew American shrugs Sunday from Paris to Rome, but tourism officials worried that it could deter would-be visitors from moving ahead with plans to cross the Atlantic.

The travel alert is a step below a formal warning not to visit Europe, but some experts said it could still hurt a fragile European economy already hit hard by the debt crisis.

"I think if someone was looking for an excuse not to travel, then this is just the ticket," said George Hobica, founder of Airfarewatchdog.com. "However, I don't think most people will alter their plans unless the threat is very specific."

The State Department alert advised the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens living or traveling in Europe to take more precautions about their personal security. Security officials say terrorists may be plotting attacks in Europe with assault weapons on public places, similar to the deadly 2008 shooting spree in Mumbai, India.

Without a specific threat, however, American visitors were not letting the alert disrupt their travels.

"We live in New York. So in New York we think about these things all the time," said Richard Mintzer, a 55-year-old American visiting Italy with his wife. "I wouldn't say we are particularly worried in Rome, no more than we would be at home, or anywhere in the Western world."

At Paris' spring-summer 2011 ready-to-wear fashion shows, W magazine fashion market director Karla Martinez said she gets "worried for five minutes, but then I forget about it and get back to the job that I'm here to do.

"It's a little scary when you're staying in a big hotel with lots of tourists, because we hear that could be a target, but I try not to get too worked up about it," she said. "At the end of the day all you can do is keep your eyes and ears open and try not to be naive."

The nonprofit group IES Abroad sent e-mails Sunday warning about 1,500 college students in its European study abroad programs to avoid crowded tourist spots and hangouts typically frequented by Americans. The message — also sent to the students' parents — also told students to leave public places if they see signs of trouble.

"We say, 'Be alert, cautious and aware of your surroundings,'" IES executive vice president Bill Hoye said. "It means, 'Don't be totally plugged into your iPod.'"

Hours after the e-mails were sent by the Chicago-based group, it had no sign of any students who wanted to drop out of the programs.

The impact on travel could deepen if the threat leads to new, tighter security measures, said Henry Harteveldt, a travel analyst for Forrester Research. But the U.S.-based Air Transport Association, a trade group for the airline industry, said it expects "business as usual."

United, Continental and Delta said they were operating as usual on Sunday without any cancellations or delays related to the terror alert. The airlines said customers will be charged the usual penalty if they want to change itineraries.

Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, said business travelers will likely keep their plans and hold onto nonrefundable tickets as long as the warning remains "fairly general."

"The biggest impact will be those people who right now haven't yet made their plans," Mitchell said. "They're the ones who will forestall their decision until the situation is a little bit more clear."

The travel alert noted in particular "the potential for terrorists to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure."

"Current information suggests that al-Qaida and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks," it said. "European governments have taken action to guard against a terrorist attack and some have spoken publicly about the heightened threat conditions."

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., stressed to reporters after talking to State Department and Justice Department officials that the alert "means be careful when you go, but they are not advising you not to go."

U.S. and European security experts have been concerned for days about a terror attack similar to the one in Mumbai, which left 166 people dead and targeted two luxury hotels, a Jewish center, a popular restaurant and a crowded train station.

Britain's Foreign Office on Sunday began warning British travelers to France and Germany that the threat of terrorism in those countries is high. Britain's Home Secretary Theresa May said the threat of terrorism in the U.K. remains unchanged at "severe," meaning an attack is highly likely.

Germany's Interior Ministry said it saw no need to change its assessment of risks to the country and there were "still no concrete indications of imminent attacks" there. France's interior minister said the threat of a terrorist attack is real but that the country is not raising its alert level.

"The terrorist threat exists, and could hit us at any moment," the French defense minister, Herve Morin, was quoted as saying in the daily Le Parisien. "Networks organizing themselves to prepare attacks are constantly being dismantled around the world. It is good for the French to know this,"

A French official said Sunday that Italian police had arrested a Frenchman suspected of links to a network recruiting fighters for Afghanistan. The man was arrested in Naples in early September, said the official, who was not authorized to be publicly named because terrorism cases are classified.

The U.S. alert is not changing plans for three NBA teams to play preseason games this week in London, Milan and Barcelona, Spain, though Minnesota Timberwolves coach Kurt Rambis said players were getting additional security when they went out.

Kobe Bryant and other members of the Los Angeles Lakers attended a Premier League game between London rivals Chelsea and Arsenal. Lakers center Pau Gasol said he had no intention of spending his time in London sitting in a hotel room.

"It's a great city to be out and walk around in, and experience things. It would be a crime to stay at the hotel," Gasol said.

The U.S. notice said citizens "should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling," according to the alert.

The alert wasn't intended to urge travelers to stay away from public places. It fell short of a formal travel warning, which could have had broader implications including a stronger likelihood of canceled airline and hotel bookings and the suspension of many U.S. college and university study-abroad programs.

Despite concerns that the alert could cause a European travel slump, there was no strong opposition to it from European leaders, who were advised privately of the impending action, a European official said.

Marietta Rough, a British tour guide in Berlin, said being concerned about terrorism while traveling has simply become something everyone has to live with.

"It shouldn't affect your daily life, and I certainly don't feel like it is here in Berlin," she said.

U.S. intelligence officials believe Osama bin Laden is behind the plan to attack several European cities. If that's true, it would be the most operational role bin Laden has played in plotting attacks since Sept. 11, 2001.

Eight Germans and two British brothers are at the heart of an al-Qaida-linked terror plot against European cities, but the plan is still in its early stages, with the suspects calling acquaintances in Europe to plan logistics, a Pakistani intelligence official said last week. One of the Britons died in a recent CIA missile strike, he said.

The Pakistani official said the suspects are hiding in North Waziristan, a Pakistani tribal region where militancy is rife and where the U.S. has focused many of its drone-fired missile strikes.

____

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by Emily Straton, BBC News Analyst, for the BBC's Biodun Iginla

Last updated at 5:03 PM on 25th April 2010

Up to 50,000 Britons remain stranded abroad after the volcanic ash chaos and many may not get home until the middle of next month.

In many parts of the world there are not enough planes available to get passengers back, and airlines face a 'battle' to repatriate holidaymakers still stuck overseas. 

In some cases passengers are sleeping rough at airports because non-EU carriers have no obligation to provide them with food and accommodation while they wait  for a seat home.

Stranded: Hundreds of desperate Britons are sleeping on the basement floor at Bangkok's International Airport, Thailand, while waiting to get flights home

The Association of British Travel Agents say 35,000 tourists who booked through their members are still stuck. Industry insiders believe at least 15,000 more have been left marooned who have booked direct with airlines.

Airline bosses yesterday blamed Government 'over-reaction' for grounding planes for six days after the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano and demanded state compensation for their losses.

The travel industry was aiming to have more than 100,000 people back in Britain by last night, a majority of those who were stranded by the volcanic ash cloud thrust into the sky 12 days ago.

But that still left tens of thousands abroad, many fearing they will be forgotten as the rest of the country to moves on to other concerns.

Virgin Atlantic chief Sir Richard Branson said his airline was still 'battling'  to get some people home and, although it was 'nearly on top of the problem',  there was 'maybe another week or so to go' to get back to normal.

Mark Tanzer, Abta's chief executive, said: 'There is still quite  a high level of disruption. In some areas of the world, there is a significant  lack of air capacity to enable British people to be returned quickly.'

Waiting game: Passengers take a nap in the departures area of Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok

According to industry insiders there were still 10,000 passengers stranded in Egypt, 9,000 in Florida, 5,000 in South Africa, 4,000 in California, 2,500 in  Thailand, and 2,000 in Malaysia.

In an attempt to clear the backlog, both Virgin Atlantic and British Airways appealed for volunteers to give up their seats to stranded travellers.

In a YouTube message to customers, BA boss Willie Walsh, who claimed the ban was unnecessary, said: 'I know how stressful it must be for you to be stuck  abroad. I know how important it is for you to get home and I want to assure you  that we are doing everything we possibly can to do so.'

The airline was putting on extra flights from New York, Newark, Hong Kong, the  Maldives, Delhi, Barbados, Johannesburg and Bangkok.

But BA has been accused of profiteering by selling seats at premium prices from airports where passengers remain stuck. It denies the charge and claims it has hiked prices to discourage new customers.

Lionel Frewin, who is marooned in Singapore, said he was offered an immediate rebooking for 1 May or a refund.

'If we didn't take that booking we would be put back to 5 May. We had no opportunity to make enquiries of other airlines and therefore had no alternative than to take the 1 May booking.

Chaos at the check-in counters at Bangkok International Airport, Thailand as hundreds of Brits wait to hear if they are able to get on flights to return home

'Having checked the BA website daily, as they suggested, we have found that they are offering seats in business class on most flights but that the prices of these have been greatly increased.

'If you look at availability for flights after 5 May, seats currently priced at between 7,000 to 11,000 Singapore dollars (£3,320 to £5,217) are back to S$2,000. This seems to give the lie to BA's claim that they are doing everything to get stranded travellers back to the UK.'

Some Britons stranded in the Thai capital were too scared to leave Suvarnabhumi  Airport for fear of being caught up in violent anti-government protests.

Many were left to sleep on cardboard mats after their money ran out because  airlines including Thai Airways – the country’s main carrier – declined to  offer them the hotel accommodation that must be provided under EU regulations.

An estimated 350 Britons angrily crowded around check-in desks after being told  there were no seats on departing flights.

One British official described the scene as like 'the last days of Saigon'.

Shouts of 'Tell us the truth!' 'Give us the information' and 'Get us out of  here' went up as crowds surged in the main departure area.

Peter Holley, 49, from Ashford, Middlesex, said: 'My wife has a heart condition. We have been stuck here since Saturday last week. 

'Thai Airways tell us nothing. They don't tell their staff anything and  check-in girls have been reduced to tears.

'We spend our time between our bedrolls and the check-in desks.'

Ricky Payne, 44, from Grays, Essex, said:'“I've been here a week with my wife,  son and three other couples. [Officials] are telling us not to go into town. 

'It's hell. We have to sleep on the floor and there are only two male showers  and two female showers for everyone.' 

Peter Fallon, 31, with his partner Melissa Delaney, 26, from Lincoln, said: 'We  have our 22-month-old son Vincent with us so we have had to get a cheap room in  a local hotel. But we don't know if our money will last because we have no idea  when we are going home.'

Budget airline easyJet chief executive Andy Harrison and Sir Richard demanded  Government compensation.

The Virgin boss Sir Richard said the flight restrictions had cost his airline  alone £50 million.

'Behind the scenes our engineers and all the experts were telling us that there  was no danger at all to flying and I think the Government has accepted that  there was over-reaction,' he said.

'A blanket ban of the whole of Europe was not the right decision.'

A Department for Transport spokesman said: 'Safety is paramount. The decision  made by safety regulators to restrict airspace was made in line with  long-standing international guidelines and information from aircraft  manufacturers that any volcanic ash could pose a danger to aircraft.'

Across the world more than 100,000 flights were cancelled and airlines are on  track to lose an estimated £1.3billion. 

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 by Brian Orjala, for the BBC's Biodun Iginla

 

 

Published: 5:39PM BST 24 Apr 2010

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The Katla volcano, near the Icelandic village of Vik Photo: SIGURSTEINN BALDURSSON

Katla, named after a vindictive troll from Viking folklore, has also exploded in the wake of previous eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull Photo: SIGURSTEINN BALDURSSON

A specially equipped Land Rover allowed our reporter and his local guide to drive on the glacier Photo: SIGURSTEINN BALDURSSON

During the 1918 eruption, glacial floods swept down from the mountain and ash clouds turned day to pitch dark Photo: SIGURSTEINN BALDURSSON

Thorunn Bjornsdottir, 99, the only living eyewitness of the 1918 Katla eruption, says she doesn't want to see it erupt again Photo: SIGURSTEINN BALDURSSON

On the first official day of Icelandic summer, a bitter sub-zero wind whipped newly-fallen snow across the majestic mountain glacier that enveloped the crater of the Katla volcano.

The solitude and serenity was disturbed only by the rumbles from its cloud-shrouded and now notorious neighbour Eyjafjallajökull, whose violent eruptions paralysed international air travel for a remarkable week.

 

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The choking plumes of ash that Eyjafjallajökull is spewing out may have slowly diminished, but the volcano is still managing to mount some spectacular displays against dramatic backdrops of lightning showers and the Northern Lights.

And as recriminations about the handling of the great ash debacle deepen in tandem with the gradual recovery from its impact, Katla is a brooding reminder that the Land of Fire and Ice could soon deliver an even more explosive shock to the world.

A Sunday Telegraph reporter and photographer were the first journalists to set foot on its glacier since Eyjafjallajökull erupted, edging up to the crater rim at 4,000 ft in a Land Rover modified in Iceland to "super Jeep" standards for extreme conditions.

The usually pristine white wilderness was dotted with dirty smudges of crusty ash deposited in recent days. And several miles below the 2,000 ft thick ice field, the magna chambers of a volcano that has some 10 times the power of Eyjafjallajökull are long "overdue" an eruption after an unprecedented 92 years of inactivity.

Fuelling those concerns concerns, Katla, named after a vindictive troll from Viking folklore, has also exploded in the wake of previous eruptions at Eyjafjallajökull. When it last unleashed its fury and ferocity in 1918, glacial floods swept down from the mountain and ash clouds turned day to pitch dark - but the commercial aviation business had of course not been born then.

Sitting atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the fault line where two tectonic plates and are violently tearing themselves apart, Iceland is a smouldering and unpredictable physical presence in the chilly North Atlantic just 500 miles off the Scottish coast.

And in a frank interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the country's president, Olafur Grimsson, a plain-speaking left-wing academic, cited new research by Icelandic volcanologists to warn the country's neighbours to expect more intensified volcanic activity for decades to come.

"The fundamental lesson is that volcanic eruptions will continue to happen in Iceland so we'll all have to learn to live with them and handle them better," he said. "We should treat the events of the last few days as a dress rehearsal for what needs to be done if and when Katla erupts.

"There really need to be extensive plans to deal with these eruptions so that we don't see this sort of chaos and bewilderment and surprise again."

Although he declined to criticise the reactions of Britain and other European countries, he added some pointed observations. "It was only after almost a week that governments woke up to the need to instigate some effective measures," he said.

"The important thing is for governments to remain calm and rational, and not to panic and treat this as some great disaster.

"But in modern societies like Britain and Europe, there has been a disengagement between people and nature. There has been a belief that the forces of nature can't impact the functioning of technologically advanced societies. But in Iceland we learn from childhood that forces of nature are stronger than ourselves and they remind us who are the masters of the universe."

He argued that the aviation industry needed to develop better systems for monitoring ash in the air as well as possibly engines that are less susceptible to its impact.

On the south coast of Iceland, where the distinctive black sandy beaches are a constant reminder of the island's volcanic provenance, the turmoil that Eyjafjallajökull has inflicted on the rest of the world is viewed with some wry amusement.

The eruption is not even regarded as a major event by the standards of an island with 22 active volcanoes.

"Volcanoes are just not the sort of thing that panic us," said Sveinn Palsson, mayor of the small town of Vik that lives in the shadow of Katla and was covered by ash from Eyjafjallajökull. "In Florida, they live with hurricanes. In Iceland, we live with volcanoes."

But his town's location means it would be the first human settlement at risk if Katla does erupt - the contour of the coastline here leaves the community exposed to lethal tidal waves that could follow when the glacial waters crash into the ocean.

The 300 locals regularly practise an evacuation plan to take shelter in homes higher up the hill, said Mr Palsson, whose own house lies in the danger zone. But he demonstrates the unflappable nonchalance of Icelanders confronted by the forces of nature, observing: "The Europeans don't seem to have handled this so well."

Thorun Bjornsdottir is the only living islander to have witnessed the ferocity of Katla when it exploded in 1918, watching as the floodwater swept through lower ground just beneath her father's sheep farm.

"I was seven at the time but I remember it like it was yesterday," recalled the 98-year-old at the family farmhouse where she lives with her 100-year-old husband.

"The ash cloud turned day to night and it was so dark that you could not even see the candle you were carrying. And the floods were terrible. A wall of water came down the valley with waves of about three to four metres [nine to 12 feet]."

In the days before seismic monitoring stations and even electricity, the first sign that locals had that something was amiss came as ground tremors shook the oil lamps hanging on the porch. "An old lady who remembered the last eruption [in the 19th century] told us 'Katla is coming'," she said.

Now the operations rooms at the Iceland Meteorological Office (IMO) in Reykjavik is hooked by computer links to seismometers and GPS stations dotted around the island's volcanoes set to alert them if an eruption is imminent.

Even then, the advance warning may only be a couple of hours - as was the case when a surge of tremors equivalent to an earthquake of 2.7 on the Richter scale rattled the earth around Eyjafjallajökull late on April 13.

Sigurlaug Hjattadottir, an IMO scientist, described the well-honed plan that was put into action as the meteorologist working that night called the duty geophysicist at home. One look at the seismic activity on her computer was enough for her to call the civil defence authorities and alert them that an eruption appeared to be under way.

At this stage, automated text and phone messages went out to the farmers around the volcano telling them to evacuate in the early hours of April 14. As they headed to a community centre in a nearby town, the first choking clouds of ash were thrown out of Eyjafjallajökull high into jetstream winds that carried them across Britain and northern Europe within hours.

Initially, there was a striking acquiescence from stranded passengers and the aviation industry alike - despite the discomfort suffered by the former and losses for the latter - to the no-fly restrictions imposed by European air safety officials and unquestioningly implemented by national authorities.

But last week, the mood rapidly turned as it became clear not only that governments and aviation bodies had little apparent plan for tackling the crisis, but also that the blanket no-fly ban was based on largely theoretical computer models and limited information about the dispersal or volume of the ash and its impact on jet engines.

Iceland supplied information on the plume height, visual evidence about the make-up of the plume of ash and steam and analysis of grain size from ashfall to the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) in London.

But the country's top volcanologists and meteorologists said that the clearest message of Eyjafjallajökull was that civil aviation authorities and companies needed to develop more accurate models for estimating ash dispersal and impact - especially as Katla could throw up a much greater challenge.

"I would expect a major effort on this front from the aviation industry so they are better prepared for the next time," said Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson, a professor of geophysics and expert in volcanic ice. "The models clearly need to be much improved."

And despite the studied nonchalance of Icelanders about the volcanoes that created Europe's newest land, their primal environment can still surprise them. And Eyjafjallajökull did just that late last week.

It was one of the ironies of the eruption that Iceland's own airspace had been unaffected and its main airport remained open as the towering ash clouds were swept south-east over Europe by the prevailing winds.

That all changed on Friday, however. Just as the rest of the world's airports were returning to normal, the country's international airport near Reykjavik was closed when ash was carried its way. For Iceland at least, Eyjafjallajökull had a sting in its tail.

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AP – In this photo taken Friday, April 23, 2010, the Akureyi Airport is seen in Akureyi, Iceland. For the …

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LONDON – Airlines appealed to passengers to give up their seats to stranded travelers Saturday, as carriers across Europe attempted to clear a backlog of thousands of tourists grounded by the ash cloud spewed from Iceland's volcano.

British Airways and Virgin Atlantic appealed for passengers booked on long-haul flights next week to consider giving up their seat to make way for travelers still stuck following flight disruptions.

A week of airspace closures caused by ash clouds gusting from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) volcano caused the worst breakdown in civil aviation in Europe since World War II. More than 100,000 flights were canceled and airlines are on track to lose over $2 billion.

"It's a very difficult situation and we've had to deal with a lot of complexity, aircraft stuck in different parts of the world, crew stuck in different parts of the world," said British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh.

Flight authorities in Europe say the majority of the continent is now free of volcanic ash, and most airline services are operating as normal. Several carriers said they are laying on extra flights to help the stranded return home.

Iceland's civil protection agency said Eyjafjallajokull was still spewing ash, but that the plume was now around 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) high — not large enough to reach jet streams. Winds are now gusting from the south east — away from Europe, said Olof Baldursdottir, of the civil protection agency.

Most airports in Iceland — including Keflavik International Airport and Reykjavik International Airport — were closed.

"There are still a lot of tremors in the volcano, but the plume is now less than 3km high and the ash is falling mainly locally," said Baldursdottir.

Pall Einarsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, said Eyjafjallajokull was being closely monitored, and spewing ash in much smaller quantities than at the beginning of its eruption.

At London's Gatwick airport — the city's second busiest hub — Daniel Starks, a 39-year-old farmer, said he was one of 200 tourists stuck on the Spanish island of Tenerife for an extra five days as a result of the disruptions. "There's a lot still out there that can't get back," he said.

About 20,000 French citizens were still stranded in foreign airports — primarily in the United States and east Asia — according to an estimate Friday. France made euro1 million ($1.3 million) available in aid to French travelers to help cover expenses due to ash-related delays.

A spokesman for Germany's Deutsche Lufthansa AG only a few passengers were still stranded abroad.

"There are only a few passengers who are still waiting to get on a plane abroad to get back to Germany, but since there's always a few empty seats on our planes, we're taking care of this on an individual basis and are filling up those vacant seats," said Peter Schneckenleitner. "Our flight traffic is almost back to normal."

Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson has labeled as unnecessary the Europe-wide ban on flights prompted by concerns the volcanic ash could cause problems with airliner engines.

"A blanket ban of the whole of Europe was not the right decision," Branson said. "Planes have to put with sandstorms in Africa, the engines are designed to put up with a lot more than existed."

He said Virgin engineers had insisted that there "were plenty of corridors through which the airlines could have flown." Branson said his airline lost 50 million pounds ($77 million).

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has defended the decision to close European airspace, insisting it was correct to prioritize passenger safety.

___

Posted by biginla at 5:48 PM BST

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AP – Condensation trails of aircraft are seen over Frankfurt, central Germany, Thursday, April 22, 2010, as …

BRUSSELS – European airports sent thousands of planes into the sky Thursday after a week of unprecedented disruptions, with airlines piling on more flights and bigger planes to try to get as many people home as possible.

Nearly all of the continent's 28,000 scheduled flights, including more than 300 trans-Atlantic routes, were going ahead. Every plane was packed, however, as airlines squeezed in some of the hundreds of thousands who had been stranded for days among passengers with regular Thursday tickets.

Airlines said, despite their efforts, there was no quick and easy solution to cut down the backlog of passengers.

"Quite frankly we don't have an answer to this," said David Henderson, spokesman for the Association of European Airlines, which predicted it would take several days to get all stranded passengers to their destinations. "We don't know where they are and in what numbers, so we would expect it will go on into the early part of next week."

Shifting winds sent a new plume of volcanic ash over Scandinavia, forcing some airports to close again. The new airspace restrictions applied to parts of northern Scotland, southern Norway, Sweden and Finland, said Kyla Evans, spokeswoman for Eurocontrol, the European air traffic agency.

Some oil rig workers were trapped Thursday on platforms in the North Sea because helicopters were grounded.

A week of airspace closures caused by the ash threat to planes created the worst breakdown in civil aviation in Europe since World War II. More than 100,000 flights were canceled and airlines are on track to lose over $2 billion. The aviation crisis that began with an April 14 volcanic eruption in Iceland left millions of passengers in limbo and sparked calls for a wholesale reform of Europe's air traffic system.

Some travelers got a break. Authorities chartered a luxury cruise ship — the Celebrity Eclipse — to pick up 2,200 tourists in the northern Spanish port of Bilbao on Thursday and bring them back to England. A British Royal Navy ship also arrived in Portsmouth, southern England, carrying 440 troops coming home from Afghanistan and 280 civilians back from Santander, Spain.

Countries and airlines pitched in to resolve the crisis.

Spain, which was mostly open during the crisis, arranged for more than 600 special flights to help move an estimated 90,000 stranded passengers out over the past three days.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and its partners were expanding capacity on high-traffic routes from Amsterdam's Schiphol airport in hopes of decreasing the backlog. The routes included New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Sao Paolo, Dubai, Cairo, Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Osaka.

In Germany, Frankfurt and Munich airports reported about 90 percent of flights operating. Fraport AG, which operates Frankfurt International Airport — Europe's third-busiest — said it would waive parking charges for planes stuck there over the last week.

All of British airspace was open and major airports such as London's Heathrow — Europe's busiest — were running nearly full schedules. British Airways said all of its flights from London's Gatwick and City airports would take off, as well as the "vast majority" from Heathrow.

Still, flights around Britain posed potential ash ingestion problems. The ministry of defense said training flights by Typhoon fighters were suspended Thursday after ash was found in one jet's engine.

It was not immediately clear where the flight was conducted. But military jets are more susceptible to volcanic ash than civilian planes because their engines operate at higher temperatures due to more extreme performance requirements. That makes it more likely the ash will melt inside the engine and cause disruptions.

The U.S. Air Force said normal flights resumed at its bases in Britain, Italy and Germany.

Many trans-Atlantic planes between the United States and Europe were assigned flight paths above the ash cloud that still hovered east of Iceland, flying at over 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) high.

Scientists at Iceland's meteorological office said the Eyjafjallajokull volcano produced very little ash Thursday but remained quite active, with magma boiling in the crater. The plume of ash was below 10,000 feet (3 kilometers) and winds were not expected to take it over 20,000 feet.

Geophysicist Steinunn Jakobsdottir said volcanic ash was expected to fall south and southwest of the crater in southern Iceland in the coming days but it would not disrupt air travel between Europe and North America.

The volcano threw up magma chunks the size of cars and sent powerful shock waves into the air as an Associated Press reporter, photographer and television crew flew over it Wednesday in a helicopter.

In a black crater in the middle of a glacier, red magma thrashed about, propelling steaming blobs of lava onto the surrounding ice. Charges of gas — which surge from deep inside the mountain through the magma and cause tremors 15 miles (25 kilometers) away — exploded occasionally in a molten rock fireworks show.

The air around the volcano shivered with a constant, menacing growl. Bolts of lightning shot through the fumes and an eerie glow pervaded the pit of fire.

In response to the flight disruptions, Eurocontrol — the Brussels-based intergovernmental agency comprising 38 nations — was assembling a team of experts to analyze the lessons of the airspace closure,

EU spokeswoman Helen Kearns said Thursday the crisis had exposed serious flaws in the continent-wide air traffic control system. "Consumers and businesses have paid a high price over the past few days for a fragmented patchwork of air spaces," she said.

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. French traffic controllers have gone on strike to protect their lucrative jobs.

In contrast, the U.S. air traffic management system manages twice the number of EU flights for a similar cost but uses only about 20 control centers.

European governments and civil aviation authorities have defended their decisions to ground fleets and close the skies — and later to reopen them — against heated accusations by airline chiefs that the decisions were based on flawed data or unsubstantiated fears.

The International Air Transport Association has called on the EU to quickly compensate airlines for lost revenue, much like the U.S. government did following the 9/11 terror attacks.

IATA also demanded that the EU's strict passenger rights rules — which force airlines to pay for hotels and meals for routine flight delays — be relaxed to reflect the extraordinary nature of the ash crisis.

Budget airline Ryanair did a surprise U-turn Thursday and agreed to pay for stranded customers' hotel and food bills after being faced with huge EU fines if it did not.

Chief executive Michael O'Leary has called the EU travel rights rules "absurd" and discriminatory against airlines because ferry, rail and bus companies only have to pay for the price of a passenger's ticket.

___

Posted by biginla at 3:57 PM BST

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AP – A couple embrace each other after they were re-united at the arrival hall of Gatwick airport, near London, …

BERLIN – Airlines lost at least $1.7 billion in revenue during the volcanic ash crisis, an industry group said Wednesday as the debate heated up over whether European governments were justified in shutting down their airspace for so long.

Planes were flying into all of Europe's top airports — London's Heathrow, Paris' Charles de Gaulle and Germany's hub at Frankfurt. Still experts predicted it could take days — even more than a week — to clear a backlog of stranded passengers after about 102,000 flights were canceled around the world.

Eurocontrol, the air traffic control agency in Brussels, said 21,000 of the continent's 28,000 scheduled flights were going ahead Wednesday. Air traffic controllers lifted all restrictions over German airspace, but some restrictions remained over parts of Britain, Ireland and France.

Spain, which has remained mostly open throughout the crisis, developed into a key emergency travel hub, arranging for hundreds of special flights to move over 40,000 people stranded by the travel disruptions.

In London, Britain's transport secretary, Andrew Adonis, denied that the government decided to reopen the skies to air travel under pressure from airlines.

"They have obviously wanted to be able to fly their planes — of course they have — but that has not been the issue at stake here," he told the BBC.

But British Airways initiated a showdown by announcing Tuesday it had more than 20 long-haul planes in the air and wanted to land them in London. Despite being told that British air space was firmly shut, radar tracking sites showed several BA planes circling in holding patterns over England late Tuesday before the surprise announcement that air space was being 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 London's 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 it was going to Shannon airport in western Ireland.

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

The British Airways chief was unrepentant.

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

In Berlin, Giovanni Bisignani, the head of the International Air Transport Association, called the economic fallout from the six-day travel shutdown "devastating" and urged European governments to examine ways to compensate airlines for lost revenues, as the U.S. government did following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

He said it would take three years for the industry to recover from the week of lost flying time.

Airlines lost $400 million each day during the first three days of grounding, Bisignani told a news conference Wednesday. At one stage, 29 percent of global aviation and 1.2 million passengers a day were affected by the airspace closure ordered by European governments, who feared the risk that volcanic ash could pose to airplanes.

"For an industry that lost $9.4 billion last year and was forecast to lose a further $2.8 billion in 2010, this crisis is devastating," Bisignani said. "Governments should help carriers recover the cost of this disruption."

He noted that the scale of the crisis eclipsed the events of Sept. 11, when U.S. airspace was closed for three days.

German aviation agency Deutsche Flugsicherung said the decision to reopen the country's airspace Wednesday was based on weather data, not economics. It said the concentration of volcano ash in the sky "considerably decreased and will continue to dwindle."

"Bremen, Hamburg, Hannover, Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich are open again," said spokesman Axel Raab.

"We cannot say what it will look like in the next few days. If the volcano becomes active again, new closures might happen," Raab added.

A test flight carried out by the German Aerospace Center found various levels of volcanic ash at different sites over Germany. The highest concentration of ash was over eastern Germany, which the report said was comparable in density to a plume of dust above the Saharan desert. The airspace above the northern city of Hamburg was entirely free from ash.

The center reported no damage to the airplane that flew the test flight.

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 to the aircraft. Officials say the fighter-bomber's engine had "contaminants on its inside surfaces" that would be further analyzed.

A French weather service plane also took samples of the air Tuesday and found no volcanic ash problems either, transport minister Dominique Bussereau said.

Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary was one of many airline executives calling the airspace shutdowns excessive.

"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.

"Nobody in their right mind would want to fly through a dark plume of smoke. But by the time that that cloud has dispersed through 800 or 1,000 nautical miles of air space, a full ban should never have been imposed," O'Leary said.

But Eamonn Brennan, chief executive of Irish Aviation Authority, defended the governments' responses. He said there was "no safe, quick fix" for the problem and the closures allowed Europe to come up with a risk-mitigation scheme to handle an unprecedented situation.

"It's important to realize that we've never experienced in Europe something like this before. So it wasn't just a simple matter of saying: Yes, you could have operated on Saturday or Sunday or Monday," 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."

In Iceland, where all the trouble began with an April 14 eruption, there was no sign Wednesday that the Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) volcano would stop erupting anytime soon, according to Pall Einarsson, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Sciences in Reykjavik.

"We cannot predict when it will end," he said. "(But) ash production is going down and is really insignificant at the moment."

However, scientists at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology said Wednesday that an initial analysis of atmospheric data over Zurich showed that closing Europe's airspace was warranted for safety reasons.

The scientists analyzed samples collected over the weekend by specially equipped weather balloons and concluded that the concentration of particles was "very high," at up to 600 micrograms per cubic meter, according to Prof. Thomas Peter.

The scientists also said the composition of the volcano's magma is changing, causing some concern that it might take on a more explosive form.

According to Peter Ulmer, a professor of petrology, the volcano has been pushing out magma with a higher silicate content since April 14. If the level of silicate reaches 56 percent or the share of magnesium falls below 4 percent, then the magma can become explosive even without the presence of huge ice caps like the current volcano.

At Heathrow's Terminal 3 on Wednesday, no one was allowed inside the departures level without a valid ticket. The departure boards still showed about half the flights as canceled.

Despite the uncertainty, passengers were optimistic. Juanjo Dominguez, a 25-year-old web designer from London, was at the airport for his afternoon flight to New York.

I feel good, hopeful," Dominguez said. "I am still keeping my fingers crossed."

Still, there was just a small trickle of passengers arriving at Heathrow.

Emirates airline, the Mideast's biggest, sent 37 flights from Dubai to Europe, including 12 flights to Britain and seven to Germany. Its first flight to land in Britain was a double-decker Airbus A380 carrying more than 500 people.

The airport in Barcelona — near the border with France and thus a gateway to the rest of Europe — took in flights from New York, Orlando, Vancouver, Paris, Nice and Rome. Nearly 300 buses were chartered from Barcelona and Spain to get people to other cities in Europe.

At Bilbao in northern Spain, more than 2,000 weary Britons packed a ferry Wednesday and headed for England after days of trying to escape the volcanic ash travel nightmare.

The ferry normally takes 1,000 people on its twice-weekly, 30-hour trip to Portsmouth in southern England. This time, however, it was carrying around 2,200 people and had to ask strangers to share sleeper cabins.

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

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

___

Posted by biginla at 6:24 PM BST

Updated: Wednesday, 21 April 2010 6:26 PM BST

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AP – An Air France aircraft take off at the Charles De Gaulle airport just outside Paris, Tuesday, April 20, …

LONDON – Many European flights took to the skies Tuesday for the first time in days, with even Britain's busy airports promising to reopen, but the travel chaos was far from over: a massive flight backlog was growing and scientists feared yet another volcanic eruption in Iceland.

London airports were closed during the day Tuesday, and in the evening officials said they would reopen all U.K. airports Tuesday night. British Airways said it hoped to land two dozen flights in London from the United States, Asia and Africa.

It was the first day since Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl) volcano erupted Wednesday that travelers were given a glimmer of hope.

Cheers and applause broke out as flights took off from Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport, Amsterdam and elsewhere. German airspace remained officially closed but 800 planes were allowed to land or take off, all flying at low altitude.

"Everyone was screaming in the airplane from happiness," said Savvas Toumarides of Cyprus, who arrived in New York after getting stuck in Amsterdam for five days and missing his sister's wedding. He said the worst part was "waiting and waiting and not knowing."

"We were in the hotel having breakfast, and we heard an aircraft take off. Everybody got up and applauded," said Bob Basso of San Diego, who has been stranded near Charles de Gaulle since Friday.

The Eurocontrol air traffic agency in Brussels said it expected just under half of Europe's 27,500 flights to go ahead Tuesday, a marked improvement over the last few days. The agency predicted close to normal takeoffs by Friday.

"The situation today is much improved," said Brian Flynn, deputy head of operations at the Brussels-based agency.

But with more than 95,000 flights canceled in the last week alone, airlines faced the enormous task of working through the backlog to get passengers where they want to go — a challenge that could take days or even weeks.

Passengers with current tickets were being given priority — stranded passengers were being told to either pay for a new ticket, take the first available flight or to use their old ticket and wait for days, or weeks, for the first available seat.

"I'm supposed to be home, my children are supposed to be in school," said Belgian Marie-Laurence Gregoire, 41, who was traveling in Japan with her husband and three children, ages 6, 8, 10. They said the best that British Airways could do was put them on a flight to Rome.

"I'm tired. I just want to go home," she said.

Although seismic activity at the volcano has increased, the ash plume appeared to be shrinking Tuesday. Still, scientists were worried that the activity could trigger an even larger eruption at the nearby Katla volcano, which sits on the massive Myrdalsjokull icecap and has erupted every 80 years or so — the last time in 1918.

"The activity of one volcano sometimes triggers the next one, and Katla has been active together with Eyjafjallajokull in the past," said Pall Einarsson, professor of geophysics at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland.

At eruption at Katla could spark similar travel disruptions, depending on the prevailing winds. But in Iceland's eight volcanic eruptions in the last 40 years, only the recent one at Eyjafjallajokull was followed by winds blowing toward northern Europe.

An international pilots group warned of continued danger because of the ash, which drifted over the North Sea and was being pushed back over Britain on Tuesday by shifting north winds.

A Eurocontrol volcanic ash map on Tuesday listed the airspace between Iceland, Britain and Ireland as a no-fly zone, along with much of the area around the Baltic Sea. The ash cloud also spread westward from Iceland, toward Greenland and Canada's eastern coastline.

Still, planes were being allowed to fly above 20,000 feet (7,000 kilometers) over the United Kingdom.

Herbert Puempel at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva said there was a small possibility that some far-flung airports on the Canadian east coast, such as Goose Bay, might be affected by the ash but said "a serious effect on the eastern seaboard I think is very unlikely."

The volcano was also grumbling — tremors, which geologists believe to be caused by magma rising through the crust, can be heard and felt as far as 16 miles (25 kilometers) from the crater.

"It's like a shaking in the belly. People in the area are disturbed by this," said Kristin Vogfjord, geologist at the Icelandic Met Office.

Scottish airports let in a handful of domestic flights, while Switzerland and northern Italy also opened their airspace. Some flights took off from Asia to southern Europe and came in from Cairo, where at least 17,000 people had been stranded.

Airports in central Europe and Scandinavia were open and most of southern Europe remained clear. Spain volunteered to be an emergency hub for overseas travelers trying to get home and piled on extra buses, trains and ferries to handle the expected crush.

Britain sent a navy ship to Spain to fetch 500 troops coming home from Afghanistan and pick up hundreds of passengers stranded by the chaos.

"How many modes of transport have I been on? I have lost count now," said Angus Henderson, 40, of the 1st Battalion, Royal Welsh, an infantry unit. "Planes, buses and now ships."

Henderson was pressing to get back to Britain to see his wife and three small kids and attend the funeral of a colleague killed in Afghanistan. But the trip on the HMS Albion, a 570-foot (173-meter-long) amphibious assault ship, will take 40 hours from Santander in northern Spain to Portsmouth, England.

Patricia Quirke of Manchester said she and nine other families drove all night across Spain just to catch the Royal Navy ride.

Many Asian airports and airlines remained cautious, and most flights to and from Europe were still canceled. Australia's Qantas canceled its Wednesday and Thursday flights from Asia to Frankfurt and London, as well as return flights to Asia, saying the situation was too uncertain.

The aviation industry — facing losses of more than $1 billion — has sharply criticized European governments' handling of the disruption that grounded thousands of flights on the continent. But its first order of business was to cut down that flight backlog.

"We've never had a backlog like this before," said Laurie Price, director of aviation strategy at consultant Mott Macdonald.

Spain's main airline Iberia said it was using bigger planes and adding extra flights to help stranded passengers get to their destinations. Other airlines were hiring buses to help customers get home.

Most airlines said they would let passengers with tickets for a departing flight this week go first, but offered to rebook customers on another plane for no additional cost.

British Airways, which has canceled about 500 flights a day for the past five days, said it was trying to clear its backlog on a case-by-case basis. It said travelers could either rebook online or claim a full refund, and it also urged travelers booked to fly this week to consider canceling their trips so the airline could fly more people home.

In the end, many people did not get a flight out Tuesday.

Phil Livingstone, a university student from St. Helens, England, spent three nights sleeping on chairs and eating cups of noodles at Seoul's Incheon International Airport.

"Hope is high at the minute just because it's the only thing we've got," he said.

___

Posted by biginla at 9:09 PM BST

Updated: Tuesday, 20 April 2010 9:11 PM BST

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