The impact on aviation of the volcanic eruption in Iceland

I have been trying to monitor the impact on aviation of the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland and the virtually unprecedented shutdown of European airspace. This post links to some of the resources that I have been using. Some of the web sites are enjoying unprecedented popularity and their performance is suffering accordingly. I have also found Twitter (I use the free program TweetDeck) useful - search for #ashtag.

The eruption itself can be seen on three webcams set up in Iceland. Of course, this is daylight and weather dependent.

Maps with live air traffic over Europe (the advice is use any web browser except MS Internet Explorer) can be seen at:

• RadarVirtuel.com
• flightradar24.com

The official news about airspace availability can be seen on the web sites of:

• Eurocontrol
• NATS - covering the UK

Specific information on the ash cloud is released by the UK Met Office Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre.

On 19 April 2010 IATA commented on the situation and released an assessment that the likely daily revenue loss to airlines of being grounded would be in excess of US$200m per day. ACI Europe and CANSO have made similar estimates for the daily financial impact on airports and air traffic control providers respectively.

Because of the uncertainty about the event, scenario analysis provides useful way of thinking about the impacts. A series of articles from Reuters by Peter Apps are the best I have seen so far:

• Scenarios - Potential scenarios for volcano gas cloud crisis - 18 April 2010
• Scenarios - How could Europe volcano crisis play out? - 19 April 2010
• Scenarios: What if volcano disruption last weeks, months? - 20 April 2010

This truly is a "Black Swan" event (see previous post) and may prove to be a real test of concern about safety versus concern about the economic survival of the European airline industry.

Fourth round of EU-USA air services negotiations

A further three-day round of air services negotiations, the fourth in the second stage of the EU-USA "open skies" arrangements, commenced on 7 October 2009 in Washington DC (see previous post). Agreement was reached to include Norway and Iceland in the arrangements.

The next round is to start in Brussels on 9 November 2009.

Reports on the negotiations appeared in the Wall Street Journal (on 7 October 2009), Flight Global (on 9 October 2009), and from Dow Jones (on 9 October 2009).

Where is the world's economic centre of gravity?

An interesting paper from Jean-Marie Grether and Nicole Mathys in Switzerland entitled Is the World’s Economic Center of Gravity Already in Asia? and dated August 2008 locates the world's current economic centre of gravity off the north coasts of Norway and Russia.

The bad news for New Zealand is that Auckland is the most distant major city (with more than one million inhabitants) in the world from the economic centre. The vaguely promising news for New Zealand is that the economic centre is slowly moving closer.

As for Iceland, even without its recent economic collapse, the centre has been moving away to its north east since the mid 1970s.

Singapore concludes "open skies" agreements with the Czech Republic and Iceland

In separate media statements the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) announced on 19 and 23 January 2009 that Singapore has negotiated "open skies" type air services agreements with the Czech Republic (Straits Times report) and separately with Iceland (Straits Times report). The latter includes an exchange of seventh freedom rights.

This brings the number of "open skies" partners Singapore has to more than 30, 16 of which are with European Union member states.

Canada and Iceland conclude "open skies" air services agreement

On 18 July 2007 the Canadian Minister of Transport announced the conclusion of a new bilateral "open skies" agreement between Canada and Iceland.