Icelandic Volcano now affecting F1

[Jericoke]

You are right in principal Judy, unfortunately there are one or two problems with switching. Most people will have already paid for their air tickets and although they can claim a refund they will not get that money for some while meaning more cost to change to another form of transport. Some people are using the return part of an air ticket and it is not clear whether this will be refunded as the airlines may choose to offer the next available flight, if they are like me at the end of a holiday they will not have the cash to pay for other transport. The other bigger problem is the capacity of the other forms of transport, since they have to run services that are profitable there will only be a small surplus available for those switching from air.

 

Yay American (and by extension Canadian) car/self reliance culture 

It is tough when part of every day life suddenly becomes unavailable.  There just isn't anything to replace it.  John's right, that there aren't hundreds of unused trains just waiting to take all the air traffic, especially since the countries affected are generally remote from the rest of Europe anyway.  Can you take a train from Norway to Germany if you wanted to?

[judy]

You are probably right, John and Jeri that the capacity of other forms of transport such as rail may not be sufficient to temporary replace air travel.

John, Hope that you will be able to get home soon!

[Jericoke]

The Royal Navy is now ferrying people.

A very nice solution to the problem I think:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/04/19/volcano.ash/index.html?hpt=T2

[FW14B]

I wish I could get on board HMS Ark Royal