German airspace partially reopened

HAMBURG - Six of Germany’s 16 international airports were partially reopened for a few hours until Sunday evening, air traffic controllers announced.

Eastbound flights are to resume until 8 p.m. (2330 IST) from both airports in the capital Berlin, as well as airports in the cities of Hamburg, Hanover, Erfurt and Leipzig.

Air traffic controllers were still deciding how to proceed after this partial easing of travel restrictions ends at 8 p.m. For all other German airports, including Frankfurt, a complete travel ban remained in place until the same time.

Hundreds of thousands of airline passengers have been stranded throughout Europe, as ash from the volcano near Iceland’s Eyjafjallajoekull glacier has led to an unprecedented shutdown of much of European airspace.

German airspace was shut down late Friday, in line with other northern European countries, due to a cloud of volcanic ash hanging over the continent.

The flight ban delayed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s return from a visit to the US by two days, and created problems for exhibitors travelling to the Hanover trade fair.

Meanwhile, Germany’s two largest airlines criticized the decision to shut down the country’s airspace, suggesting there was not sufficient evidence that this step was necessary.

“The airspace closure resulted purely from data generated by a computer simulation at the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in London,” Air Berlin’s chief executive Joachim Hunold told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

The data was used to calculate which areas would be contaminated by volcanic ash from Iceland, the paper said, adding that this led to the decision by Germany’s air traffic control centre to close down the airspace.

“Not even a weather balloon has been sent up to measure whether, or how much, volcanic ash is in the air,” added the CEO of Germany’s second largest air carrier.

Both Air Berlin and Germany’s largest airline, Lufthansa, flew planes without passengers Saturday, in order to have machines at the ready once the flight ban was lifted.

“In Frankfurt, technicians examined the planes. There was not even the slightest scratch on the cockpit windows, the shell or in the engines,” Lufthansa spokesman Klaus Walther told Bild am Sonntag.

Lufthansa flew 10 planes, up to a height of 8,000 metres.

Thousands of travellers switched to trains instead, and Rail operator Deutsche Bahn put on extra trains to meet the surge in demand.

The German Aerospace Centre announced that a research plane would take off Monday to measure airborne ash particles, after they had finished equipping the plane with an ash detector.

Germany’s weather service was reportedly not able to carry out detailed measurements from the ground, as five of the country’s six laser measuring units were undergoing maintenance work.