What the commentators said

Until last week, the airline industry did not allow its planes "anywhere near volcanic ash", said
Jad Mouawad in The International Herald Tribune — for very good reasons. The ash is fine-
grained, sharp and abrasive: it hangs in the air "like millions of pieces of shredded glass", ready
to "sandblast" windshields, clog filters and cause engines to flame out. There were three
incidents in which airliners hit ash in the 1980s. two above Indonesia and one above Alaska. In
all three cases, their jet engines cut out, turning the planes into "overweight gliders" that lost
thousands of feet before their pilots managed to restart them. Ash clouds are also hard to spot:
they often resemble water vapour. As a result, the International Civil Aviation Organisation has
bad a "zero tolerance" policy, said Victoria Gill on BBC News Online. The advice was: "If you
sec ash, you fly 100 miles away from it". But this was before it was spewed over Europe's
busiest flighrpaths - something unknown in living memory. Six days of discussions between
scientists and aviation engineers followed, resulting in a new safety threshold: the experts
examined the results of test flights and concluded that the levels of concentration above the UK
mostly pose no threat. "It often takes a major incident such as this to effect reforms."
We should be grateful that EyjafjallajokuU has brought only mild "inconvenience", said Bill
McGutre in The Times. The eruption was nothing compared to that of Loki, another Icelandic
volcano, which in 1783 "spawned a sulphurous cloud" that hung over Europe into 1784,
killing many and withering crops (the famines it caused helped spark the French Revolution). In
1815, the biggest eruption of the last millennium, at Tambora, Indonesia, "wrapped a veil of
gases around the entire planet, blocking the sun's rays and leading to the so-coifed year without
o summer". And the "cataclysmic" eruption of Toba, also in Indonesia, 74,000 years ago,
nearly wiped out the human race. All in all, "things could have been much worse".


What next?
Scientists say the volcano is
still erupting, hut the ash
me is now shrinking.
However, "a far bigger
volcano is tipped to erupt in
the coming months",
reports The Independent.
Each time Eyjafjallajokull
has erupted in the past
2,000 years-in 1612 and
1821-23 - its neighbour
Katla, which is ten times
larger, has exploded within
six months. Iceland's
President Olafur Grimsson
said that his country had
been preparing for this
event for years. "I think it is
high time for European
governments and airline
authorities to start planning
for the eventual Katla
eruption," he said.