Airspace in most of Europe has been reopened but many travellers are still stranded as airlines seek to shift a huge backlog after about 95,000 flights were cancelled in the last week.
- Germany's air-traffic controllers said they were gradually reopening the country's airspace on Wednesday, a day after Britain, France and Belgium all allowed at least partial resumption of services.
- "There is a good chance that the airspace above Germany and all international airports will remain available until late in the evening," the government agency Deutsche Flugsicherung said.
- Denmark said it was to reopen all its airspace from 9:00 GMT on Wednesday.
- The Eurocontrol air traffic agency in Brussels predicted that the number of take-offs and landings in Europe would be close to normal by Friday.
- Volcano ash chaos
- An ash cloud from a volcano eruption on Iceland caused air traffic authorities across Europe to close airspace over most of the continent and millions of people were affected.
- The Eyjafjallajoekull volcano has been spewing ash and lava for days, but since the weekend, the eruption has lost nearly 80 per cent of its intensity, a spokeswoman for Iceland's civil protection agency said on Wednesday.
- The airport shutdowns have cost the airline industry $200 million a day, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
- Giovanni Bisignani, the IATA chief, told Italian television that more than five medium- and small-sized European airlines risked bankruptcy in the fall-out from the ash cloud shutdowns and called for EU compensation.
- At London's Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport, the first flight landed on Tuesday night after a five-day shutdown.
- Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, reporting from Heathrow, said: "Planes are coming in every couple of minutes and, obviously, it is a very joyous sight for a lot of those stranded travellers.
- "When people were watching the arrivals board and saw the sign that said 'landed', there were screams of excitement."
- Passenger backlog
- With more than 95,000 flights cancelled across the world, it will be some time before the airlines are able to clear the backlog of passengers.
- British Airways, which cancelled about 500 flights a day in the past five days, said it was trying to clear its backlog on a case-by-case basis.
- It said travellers could either rebook online or claim a full refund, and it also urged travellers booked to fly this week to consider cancelling their trips so that it could maximise space to fly people home.
- Spain's Iberia said it was coping with the backlog by using bigger aircraft and adding extra flights.
- "We've never had a backlog like this before," Laurie Price, the director of aviation strategy at consultant Mott Macdonald, said.
"After 9/11 airspace was shut for three days, and then the US airlines were bailed out by the government."
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