THE AIRPORT in the Icelandic capital Rejkjavik closed on Friday, finally shut down by ash from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano that had caused such transport misery across Europe. Although the airport is barely a hundred kilometres from the eruption, it had previously escaped its impact, remaining open to transatlantic flights while Europe ground to a halt.
As a changing wind finally brought the transport crunch home to where it all began, the rest of Europe began flying again, picking up the pieces and counting the cost of six days of chaos. Estimates say the crisis cost the European economy at least €1.5 billion, and the aviation industry a further €750 million – sums they can ill-afford at a time of such economic pain.
For days, the news was dominated by weather charts and tales of stranded passengers. Suddenly, we realised just how dependent we had become on air travel – and none more than island nations suddenly cut adrift. For the UK, the Channel tunnel, once so controversial, became a precious lifeline. Here in Cyprus, an island almost entirely without boats, we can only shudder at what a shutdown would mean had it grounded us rather than just cutting us off from anywhere north of Rome.
The European Union came to a halt, everything from major summits to routine meetings cancelled; football fans watched aghast as millionaire players got a taste of public transport in epic journeys to reach continental cup ties; schools pondered whether to reopen with so many staff and pupils stranded away from home.
As the Financial Times ‘Fast Lane’ columnist Tyler Brule aptly commented, the eruption “revealed the glaringly obvious – that the world cannot function on fibre-optic cables, huge servers and social network sites alone, and is rather helpless when there is not a fully fuelled Airbus or Boeing close at hand.”
When we speak of the global village, we tend to think of those things that give us the illusion of proximity – emails, downloads, cable TV, Facebook friends, Skype calls and instant money transfers. We forget that the one thing that really makes the difference is cheap, fast and reliable transport, transforming our professional and personal lives and the world in which we live.
Because it seems so easy, we have forgotten how complex and ultimately dangerous it is to put people up into the air. The flight networks that oil the engines of our global economy are highly vulnerable, constantly at the mercy of the weather, mechanical failure, labour unrest and terrorist threats. And when they break down, it’s suddenly a very long way from Cyprus to the UK, let alone Beijing to Berlin. Try doing those journeys overland and you realise the distance between places still counts a lot.
So what are the lessons to be learned? In the short term, air traffic authorities will have refined their understanding of the impact of volcanic ash, allowing a more nuanced response than the blanket ban that shut down European airspace. Efforts will be made to speed up moves towards a Single European Sky that would allow a fast, coordinated EU response instead of the fragmented response from a patchwork of 27 national airspaces.
Governments will also have to understand that, like banks, air services are simply too important to be allowed to fail. The regulatory insistence on forcing cash-strapped airlines to fork out millions of euros in expenses and compensation to stranded passengers for an event over which they had no control is absurd when it is the taxpayers that will be called to bail out those same airlines when they are pushed over the brink.
Longer term, however, we have to look at reducing our dependency on air travel. Volcanoes and terror threats have dramatically exposed our vulnerability, but over time, the greater threat to sustainability may come from rising oil prices and growing environmental considerations.
The answer is staring us in the face. The airspace shutdown was a much less dramatic story in continental Europe than in the UK because of the prevalence of high-speed rail links, which over recent years have driven domestic air travel out of business. Spreading out from France, which pioneered the service in Europe, trains are taking passengers from city centre to city centre at up to 300km/h.
Planned expansion will allow passengers to go from Scotland to Southern Spain in the coming decade, while high-speed lines are being laid down everywhere from Argentina to Morocco. Most dramatically, China is in the middle of a €550 billion railway expansion project – with plans for an international high-speed rail network to India and Europe within the next ten years that could connect Beijing and London in just two days. Two weeks ago, it may have been tempting to laugh off such a suggestion – now it cannot come too soon.
