Catania-Fontanarossa closed to all flights on Saturday, September 26. Not the first time this year not even the fifth. Mount Etna’s North-East Crater kicked up an ash column, INGV bumped its aviation alert straight to red, and the airspace sector over the airport got sealed off. What started as a rough night (a thunderstorm had already backed up arrivals) turned into a closure that stretched into Sunday afternoon, once the eruption column climbed to around 4 km.
Here’s the thing about volcanic ash that people don’t always get: it’s not smoke. It’s ground-up rock and glass. Suck that into a jet engine and it melts in the hot section, then re-hardens on the turbine blades which is about as bad as it sounds. It also pits windscreens and clogs the sensors that tell pilots their airspeed. This isn’t a new lesson, either. A British Airways 747 lost all four engines in 1982 after flying through ash from an Indonesian volcano. Everyone survived, but the industry never forgot it, and it’s why airports don’t mess around with even moderate ash.
What’s different about this year is the frequency. Catania’s had ash-related shutdowns in August, mid-September, and now this. One August closure sent ash as far as Libya. Another cut arrival capacity to five planes an hour less than half normal. Airlines serving eastern Sicily are starting to treat Etna less like a rare disruption and more like a line item to plan around.
The August stretch was apparently the worst in over twenty years for the airport over a third of nearly 2,000 flights cancelled in a single week, 600 more diverted. Italy’s civil protection minister even weighed in publicly, which tells you something about how disruptive it’s gotten. When Catania shuts, the overflow goes to Palermo, Trapani, and Comiso, and Trenitalia has been adding trains to help people get where they’re going anyway.
There’s a bigger question sitting underneath all this: should a major international airport really sit this close to one of Europe’s most active volcanoes? Nobody’s answering that seriously yet, probably because Catania is just too central to how people reach Taormina, Syracuse, and Etna itself. Tourism season and eruption season keep overlapping, and that’s not likely to change.
If you’ve got a flight into Catania coming up check with your airline before you leave for the airport, and mentally prepare for a possible reroute to Palermo or Comiso.