Lebanon-Europe flights to return to near-normal levels by Wednesday

21 April 2010

BEIRUT: With a thick grey cloud blanketing the sky over Beirut on Tuesday, it almost looked as if ash from an erupting Icelandic volcano had descended over Lebanon.

Ash clouds hanging over much of Europe have caused travel chaos, stranding hundreds of thousands of people over the last six days. Some 95,000 flights around the world have been cancelled, resulting in losses of millions of dollars in revenues for airlines. But according to officials at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport, near-normal travel from Lebanon to Europe is expected to resume by Wednesday.

“I think the problem will start to be resolved from [Wednesday],” Khaled Shamiyeh, chief of navigation at the airport, told The Daily Star. Although smoke and lava from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano is still billowing, the ash plume is lower than it was last week, meaning high-altitude flights can recommence.

Beirut airport screens on Tuesday listed flights to several European destinations, with only two flights listed as canceled. Lebanon’s national carrier, Middle East Airlines (MEA) , resumed direct flights to Nice, southern France Tuesday morning, with a flight to Paris scheduled for early Wednesday morning, Shamiyeh said. MEA and Alitalia flights to Rome resumed Tuesday while Czech Airlines flights to Prague resumed Monday. “If you were booked for a flight last week, you’ll be put on a waiting list,” a clerk at MEA’s office at Beirut Airport said. She said flights to Frankfurt and London remained “problematic.”

The airport’s president, Daniel Haibeh, said he was uncertain of the exact number of people affected by disrupted travel at Beirut Airport but said it was a drop in the ocean compared to figures in Europe. “The number of transit passengers in Beirut obliged to remain at the airport are limited. The other passengers were in-bound.”

Sakhr al-Makhadhi, a 30-year-old London-based journalist, had a business trip to Beirut thwarted Friday. “I seem to spend my whole day checking the airline website for updates,” he said. “My life is on hold until the skies clear.”

MEA officials declined to announce estimates of the losses incurred by grounding flights, saying it was too early to assess the situation.

There were “no significant losses for the Beirut airport authorities,” Haibeh said.