Hot or not? Iceland style.

Hot or not? Iceland style.

The end of summer draws near. Temperatures fall and the dust settles around Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Far away from the white hot glare of the media, Iceland's president is demonstrating a flying lesson; every event provides an opportunity to learn.

Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson has invited geologists, pilots, regulators, airline executives and yes, even the press, to come to Iceland in September to review what happened in April when Eyjafjallajökull volcano issued the belch heard round the world.

In his invitation to the conference at Keflavik International Airport, President Grimsson quipped with delightful understatement; "the earth is capable of ultimate surprises." He then suggested to the aviation industry that "systems must take into account the will of nature."


To recap - since in a 24-hour news cycle, four months ago is practically pre-historic - from April 15-23, while Eyjafjallajökull was happily spewing its abrasive ash directly into the North Atlantic jet stream, 300 European airports shut down causing airlines to cancel thousands of flights stranding 7 million passengers. SAS Airlines claims to have lost $68 million, British Airways, $250 million.

Cutting directly to the chase, Tom Hendricks, operations and safety director for the Air Transport Association called the airline losses, "eye-watering". He told me, "It was bad enough for the U.S. carriers, it almost brought the European carriers to their knees."

Tom was flying as a captain for Delta Airlines at the time. When European aviation authorities began closing airspace, Delta and other U.S. airlines started canceling their flights rather than have their passengers, crews and airplanes grounded, even though Delta has experience flying planes in areas of volcanic activity. The European authorities were "too conservative," he said "This was a new experience for them, but the U.S. has operated safety for well over 2 decades."

"There are some 52 active volcanoes in Alaska, and there are one to two eruptions in average per year," Jón Hjaltalín Magnússon reminded me in an email. He is one of the organizers of the conference and he was explaining why Hendricks as well as representatives from Alaska Airlines, NASA the FAA, ICAO and IATA and the U.S. Geological Survey were asked to offer their advice about whether U.S. procedures should be applied elsewhere.

"The U.S. model delegates the responsibility to the operators - to the airlines," Tom said. "Airlines are managing their own risk but the Europeans chose to shutter vast areas of airspace that we thought were safe to operate in."

So next month, these disputes will get vented once again. Were the authorities overly aggressive in restricting flights? Are there ways to safely navigate around volcanic eruptions? Who should decide when it is safe to fly and when it is not, airlines or aviation regulators?

Safely protected by time if not by distance from the now-spent fury of the volcano, representatives from the whole alphabet soup of aviation organizations - a diverse crowd - will descend on Iceland to dissect what happened. It will do what aviation sometimes does so well, take the lessons of the past and apply them to the future.

Will that happen this time? It could be hot.