Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud (2010)

Iceland, April 14, 2010: Eyjafjallajökull enters its explosive phase beneath a glacier, and the plume, loaded with fine ash, drifts toward Europe on a northwesterly flow. From April 15, airspace closes over the United Kingdom, Northern Europe, then much of the continent. About six days of near paralysis, more than 100,000 flights canceled, millions of passengers stranded; IATA put the airlines' lost revenue at about 1.7 billion dollars. Almost none of it was insured. Business interruption cover requires physical damage to the insured's property, and no aircraft had been touched: they were simply kept on the ground. The few non-damage airspace closure covers, bought by some airports and tour operators, carried modest sublimits. The cost fell on carriers through Regulation 261/2004. The eruption is an extraordinary circumstance, which waives the fixed compensation, yet leaves the duty of care in place: meals, hotel, rerouting. The CJEU confirmed this in 2013 in McDonagh v Ryanair, with no limit in time or amount. Travel insurers paid case by case, depending on whether the policy named airspace closure or not; many rewrote their wordings within the year to name volcanic ash, as a covered peril or as an exclusion. The crisis also changed the flying rule. Europe had applied the ICAO doctrine of zero tolerance in ash. It then allowed flights below concentration thresholds expressed in milligrams per cubic meter, with the operator running its own safety assessment above the first threshold. Not to be confused with an accumulation of physical losses: the 2010 ash cost money by grounding fleets, without destroying a single aircraft.