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'Indefinite' UK Travel Restrictions Stay While Many European Flights Resume

April 20, 2010 at 4:35 PM | by | Comments (0)

Yesterday we reported on the tiff between the airline industry and the EU, where airline officials were blaming ongoing big ash problems on bureacratic incompetence. If only the EU's transport ministers could get together, the argument went, they would realize that airplanes can fly around or under the ash thrown up by Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano.

Well yesterday the EU's transport ministers did meet, albeit by videoconference. They went over the situation and decided—wouldn't you know it—that the continued shutdown of Europe's airspace was unnecessary. More than half of the Continent's 27,500 flights are set to take off today, though we're still nowhere near the end of this debacle. For instance Britain's airports remain closed at least through Wednesday, with London mayor Boris Johnson announcing today that travel restrictions could be "indefinite."

Some people think that Johnson's statement was ill-advised, since travelers will now exclude London as a destination for business or pleasure. But if you're a location-independent employee who can and will work from anywhere and enjoys vacationing in the UK, summer tickets to Heathrow are about to become extremely attractive. That's on top of the downward pressure already being exerted on European ticket prices, since people don't really want to vacation in a place where an exploding volcano can keep them endlessly trapped. Thank you, overly chatty mayor of London.

So far airlines have lost over one billion dollars, the result of canceling over 100,000 flights. Thousands of travelers are still stranded, and no one really knows when they'll be coming home. Again from the AP: "We've never had a backlog like this before." Knowing how well European governments responded to the eruption—and by "well" we mean "poorly"—we're kind of hoping that they have some capable help in cleaning up this mess.

[Photo: Boaworm / Wiki Commons]

Related Stories:
· Flights resume in Europe but travel chaos not over [AP]
· Big Ash Problems [Jaunted]
· Britain Travel [Jaunted]

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