Flashback Pilot Captain Klaus Sievers recalls the disruptions caused by the ash cloud, 11 years ago

Pilot Captain Klaus Sievers, 63, remembers the disruption caused by the volcanic-ash cloud over Europe, 11 years ago

As a pilot, you are always in the hands of mother nature. It is in the back of your mind from the moment you take off until you land. But even after 39 years in the profession, I’ve never seen a disruption to the airline industry quite like what happened in 2010.

On the 14 April, a volcano erupted from beneath Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier, leading to the paralysis of flights all over Europe. Prior to the pandemic, this was the biggest disturbance to air traffic since the Second World War.

The day before flights were halted, I was flying a commercial airliner back from São Paulo in Brazil to my home town, Frankfurt. I had received a warning from the Met Service, but I didn’t think too much of it. Handling ash was part of my pilot training, but more emphasis had been placed on it after the 1982 incident, when a British Airways jet flew into a cloud of volcanic ash, resulting in the failure of all four of the engines. But the weather, including eruptions, is out of your control. Panic is not something that exists in our profession.

When we landed in Germany on the morning of 15 April, the ash cloud was all over the news and the next day all air traffic was paralysed throughout Europe. This was because the eruption was located directly under a jet stream, so ash was being dispersed into the heavily used airspace. The plume ini tially rose to an estimated height of almost six miles (nine kilometres).

April is a busy month for airlines, and thousands of passengers had to delay their journeys. A very worrying question for me was: ‘What will happen to my job if I cannot fly?’ I had dreamt of being a pilot since I was little, but with airlines losing so much money, my job seemed to be hanging in the balance. In total, the ash cloud led to over 100,000 flight cancellations, at a cost estimated at £3 billion. There was complete shutdown for eight days, followed by further sporadic disruptions.

The memory that stands out the most to me is seeing Frankfurt airport completely empty: it all seemed so surreal. The boards still had flights listed, but every single one said ‘Cancelled’. With other weather events, such as hurricanes, you expect to have disruption for a day or two, but I’d never seen anything like this. Meetings of the UN in Geneva were postponed, and several foreign leaders, including Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, all had to pull out of attending the funeral in Krakow of the Polish president Lech Kaczyński.

So why did it cause so much disruption? The simple reason is that ash is abrasive, so it’s damaging to aircraft. Although a plane has never been brought down by volcanic ash, it does cause significant damage to the engines. Research shows that it also cause opaque windshields, blocked pilot sensors and unreliable airspeed information. Although this sounds scary, some of us saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the phenomenon. A friend of mine, Konradin Weber, a professor who specialises in fine dust, flew his research plane directly into the cloud in order to measure the ash.

On 21 April, flights began to operate normally again. But the event had a significant impact on my career, and I began to study aviation weather more closely. Looking back, it feels similar to the current pandemic: there are natural forces out there that are stronger and stranger than you can ever imagine.

The ash cloud rose to an estimated height of almost six miles and led to 100,000 flight cancellations