DUSHANBE, April 16, 2010, Asia-Plus — The flight Riga-Dushanbe-Riga operated by the Latvian air carrier, airBaltic, has been canceled because of drifting ash ejected from a volcano in Iceland, Muhamamdyusuf Shodiyev, a spokesman for the Dushanbe airport said.
We will recall that the first flight on the air route from Riga, Latvia to Dushanbe was operated on June 2, 2009. airBaltic operates this flight twice a week — on Mondays and Fridays.
Tajik private air carrier, Somon Air, operates flight to from Dushanbe to Frankfurt am Main, Germany on Saturdays. Timur Bandishoyev, a spokesman for Somon Air, says they hope the flight will be operated.
In the meantime, international media report much of the airspace across northern and western Europe has been closed and air control officials said some 17,000 flights would be cancelled on Friday.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers in Europe and around the world have been affected by the disruptions. Scientists say the volcano is still erupting but producing less ash.
BBC News reports Europe”s intergovernmental air control agency, Eurocontrol, said it “expects around 11,000 flights to take place today in European airspace. On a normal day, we would expect 28,000.”
Many European countries moved to close their airspace on Thursday and Friday.
The volcano began erupting on Wednesday for the second time in a month, hurling a plume of ash 11 kilometers into the atmosphere. A 500 meter-wide fissure appeared at the top of the crater. The heat melted the surrounding ice, and witnesses said two flows of meltwater started coming off the glacier on Wednesday, BBC News reported. As many as 800 people were evacuated from their homes as water carried pieces of ice reportedly the size of small houses down the mountain. A road along the flooded Markarfljot River was also cut in several places. On Thursday, the flooding was reported to have subsided.
