Eyjafjallajokull and it's 6 days of Chaos

By request I will sum up the past six days that have been quite detrimental to the aviation business.  On April 14 2010 the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted sending ash and smoke 30,000 feet up into the air.  On the ground in Iceland there was widespread flooding due to the volcano being underneath a glacier.  


This volcanic ash impeded flight because aircraft engines are not designed to be able to take in anything besides air.  The main problem that is faced when there is volcanic ash is the possibility that the silicates in the volcanic ash will turn to glass inside of the engines of the planes thus causing loss of power and avionic instruments that rely on bleed air from the engines.  


When this ash began moving east the first airports to close were the Nordic countries such as Finland, Denmark and Sweden.  Then as the ash moved progressively east the list of countries with closed airspaces grew to include almost all of western Europe and Great Britain.  One of the only countries not affected by this was Spain due to its more southern location.

The lack of flights was very detrimental for the bottom lines of these airlines.  It was reported that Emirates was losing $10 million dollars per day due to not being able to fly to Europe.  British Airways, an airline that has a hub in London was reportedly losing $35 million per day.  As you can see this incident has been very disastrous for the airline industry.