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Indian Ocean Volcano Erupts, Travelers Immediately Get Nervous

Photographers and volcano enthusiasts - which is apparently a category that exists - have been all agog about the recent eruption of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Scientists have known that something like this was coming for at least a few months but, as always with seismic events, prediction is as much an art as a science. Eventually it happened, and now we've got our second eruption of the year for the volcano, with all of the fun travel possibilities that Big Ash problems potentially present.

As far as we're concerned there's still an open debate about how much eruptions actually physically affect flights, and how much of the insanity comes from overeager and undercompetent bureaucrats. The Icelandic Ash Cloud was bad, but the logistical clusterfark that ensued was driven disproportionately by EU regulators trying to figure out what they were supposed to do and who they were supposed to do it with. The Russians and the North Americans seem to have significantly less problems with their volcanoes, although that just might be an issue of the magnitude of the eruptions. Although probably not.