Just to further strengthen my points as made above, the following is a statement issued by Christoph Mueller, this Saturday afternoon regarding the crisis. It really signifies what many of us have been stating on here for the past few days and demonstrates clearly that Aer Lingus are doing everything in their power to assist customers.
Dear Customer
The eruption of the volcano in Iceland has caused disruption on a massive scale to aviation across Europe. We know that during this time our customers have experienced all kinds of difficulties as they try to adjust their travel plans to cope with the constantly changing situation. You rely on our help and assistance in this respect and we are committed to not letting you down.
We are committed to providing you the most up to date information that we can at all times. We work very closely with our colleagues in the IAA and other aviation authorities to achieve this. We receive six hourly updates with weather charts predicting the positioning of the volcanic ash plume.
When the plume impacts on our airspace our first focus is to plot a different flight path to avoid cancelling flights, however this is often unavoidable. When airports are closed for business or flight paths are not available we must unfortunately cancel flights. At this point our key focus is to get the information to you as speedily as we can. We cancel the flights in our systems so that you can see the exact status of your flight on our website. We notify the broadcast media so customers can avoid unnecessary journeys to the airport and we send text messages to passengers for whom we have mobile phone numbers. Since this crisis began on the 15th April we have sent more than half a million messages of this nature.
This morning, 8th May, when we analysed the weather charts we saw that the ash cloud had moved over northern Spain and it became clear to us that we would not be able to operate to Spain, Portugal or the Canary Islands in the afternoon. Once these decisions to cancel services were made we immediately started communicating the unfortunate news to the affected customers through every medium possible. While we got this information to our customers as soon as it was available today's example shows that operating plans can change at short notice.
We will continue to do all in our power to get as many of our customers to their intended destinations as we possibly can and to keep all customers updated with the latest information. We thank all of our customers most sincerely for their patience and support throughout this difficult time.
Yours sincerely,
Christoph Mueller
Chief Executive