“Not again!” That was surely the reaction among recent travelers to/from airports in Ireland, Scotland, and even some parts of Northern England upon finding that, once again, flights had to be canceled for a brief period due to airborne ash from that Eyjafjallajökull Icelandic volcano. In the meantime, Scottish government officials issued predictably annoyed statements aimed at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority for taking such action, just like on a larger scale it had been loud complaints from all across the affected area that had hastened the lifting of the continent-wide flight ban that paralyzed air travel within Europe for more than a week last month.

Central to the European complaints had been assertions that the flight-bans were too extreme, that the ash really did not pose enough of a danger to justify the considerable economic damage that the bans caused – after all, a number of airlines actually went ahead and flew test-flights on their own responsibility (manned only by crews and observers, of course) up into the grit-cloud and everything seemed fine. Now the Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny reports on how Europe’s scientific community is finally getting its act together with some direct research aimed at setting firm norms for when it’s safe to fly in volcano ash, and when it is not. (more…)

An interesting incident of the beginning of last May is just now coming to light, initially out of reporting from the Spanish newspaper El País but then picked up by the major Danish dailies. All this makes sense, since it concerns a Boeing 727 from the Spanish charter-airline Air Europa which started to misbehave last May 1 as it crossed Danish airspace. Specifically, it did not respond to attempted radio contact by the Danish flight-control authorities, something that is a big no-no in this post-September 11 world. Alarms were sounded; military fighters were scrambled. (more…)

Sorry, this has nothing to do with Athens, but just in case you were wondering . . . Remember last April when a small private plan flew into the Pirelli building in Milan, and people naturally tied it to the infamous events in New York City of September 11, 2001, and to terrorism generally? Well, according to the mainstream Danish newspaper Politiken, you can rest easy: investigators have reported to Reuters that pilot Luigi Fasulo’s up-close-and-personal encounter with that building’s 32nd floor was simply an accident. They didn’t even judge it a suicide, as Fasulo’s son had maintained. Now, you might further recall that, even before that, some kid just learning to fly had flown an airplane into a building in what I recall was Tampa, Florida. I still haven’t seen any final report explaining that incident – in the Danish press, or anywhere else.