It’s 10 years since the Iceland ash cloud stopped flights – this is how I got home when I was trapped
TEN years ago, Europe’s skies cleared as all flights were grounded as a vast ash cloud from the eruption of an Icelandic volcano paralysed the airline industry.
Millions were trapped as planes could not continue to their destinations. It’s a situation we are now seeing played out again – although in very different circumstances.
ELLEN HIMELFARB, one of those stranded when the world came to a stop in 2010, looks back at the last time Europe’s airlines could not take to the skies:
ON April 15, 2010, I took one last photo of the Bay of Kotor from the harbour in Herceg Novi, a historic Venetian outpost in Montenegro.
I’d spent four days driving the country’s 90-mile coastline — what tourist boards had branded the Montenegro Riviera — for article research and had three hours left before my flight home from Dubrovnik, over the border in Croatia.
This was the longest I’d been away from my daughters, then toddlers.
I was anxious to get home, but not before capturing the competing blues of the sky, the water and the mountains opposite.
Half an hour later I pulled up to the Hertz kiosk at the airport.
“So, how are you getting home today?” asked the attendant as he took the keys.
Unusual phrasing, I thought, putting it down to poor English. “Er . . . flying.”
His English, it transpired, was fine. The airport was not.
On the departures board, the same word flashed next to each flight: Cancelled.
Then I heard the news.
A long-dormant volcano had erupted 2,000 miles away on Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier.
The airspace from there to Turkey had closed — the largest air-traffic shutdown since World War Two.
Nobody could say how long the closure would go on.
Sound familiar?
Three increasingly hysterical phone calls later (husband, editor, airline), I was herded into a minibus by a promoter from a mega-hotel called the Bellevue.
An hour later, I was slumped in my beige room, watching CNN fumble through the unknown.
Writing this now from my home quarantine, fantasising about my cancelled Easter holiday, I struggle to put myself in the mindset of decade-ago me, hogging the computer terminal in Bellevue’s lobby in a desperate race to nab the first flight out.
I don’t recall once eating a meal, though I remember pacing the cafeteria and marching into the Old City to get drunk with regulars at a bar called The Bar.
And wandering to the beach to watch couples kiss under a sky — a sky infuriatingly clear of ash.
Not for a moment did I feel grateful to be there in enforced idleness. Until it was over.
On day three my husband rang with the command to pack up and go.
In an hour, a Werner Reisen coach would leave the bus terminal for Frankfurt in Germany and he’d reserved me a seat — my only hope out of Croatia for a week, at least.
“Wait. Already?” I thought as I hugged the concierge and flew into a cab.
Only when I was sat on the 18-hour bus ride, my freedom nearly gone, could I appreciate it.
I marvelled at Neum, a sliver of seaport belonging to Bosnia and Herzegovina, busy with tankers.
I chatted with students heading home from uni and construction workers roaming Europe as newly minted EU members.
I smoked with them at rest stops like the delightfully named Mashed Potato, outside Zagreb.
Unable to sleep, I tried my hand at poetry, inspired by the Austrian Alps and Bavarian valleys.
As the grotesqueness of the situation subsided, I began, in those last quiet moments, to enjoy myself.
Pulling into Frankfurt’s main station at 5am, I was able to sneak onto a Brussels-bound train undetected.
British passengers multiplied, fleeing Sweden, Poland . . .
We exchanged tales, and tips for scoring Eurostar tickets home.
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A few of us managed seats on the last crossing that day, stepping over unluckier travellers as we dashed.
I returned to my kids, my hero of a husband and a house full of stranded friends eager to hear my story in all its gory detail.
By then, it didn’t seem so gory. It’s almost appealing to go back.
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