Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky.
Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier.
Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled.
Photo: AFP
“Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations.
Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in recent weeks have killed nine people, with 31 injured and more than 11,000 evacuated, Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency said on Tuesday.
Eruptions can pose serious risks to flights, disgorging fine ash that can damage jet engines and scour a plane’s windscreen to the point of invisibility.
Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific also listed its flights as canceled, rescheduling routes to and from Bali until today.
“Virgin Australia has made some changes to its current flight schedule, due to the impacts of the volcano in Indonesia,” the airline said, listing scrapped flights to Sydney and Melbourne.
Jetstar said all flights to and from Bali would be halted until noon today.
Qantas said “a number of flights to and from Denpasar Airport in Bali have been disrupted” due to volcanic ash from Lewotobi.
Malaysia Airlines said it had canceled six flights yesterday in a statement on its Web site.
The airlines said they would monitor the volcano’s status and provide updates.
Singapore Airlines was still listing its flights as running on yesterday.
Ahmad Syaugi Shahab, general manager of Bali’s international airport, said 12 domestic and 22 international flights had been affected on Tuesday.
He did not provide details about affected flights on yesterday’s schedule.
“Due to this natural event impacting flight operations, airlines are offering affected passengers the options of refunds, rescheduling, or re-routing,” he added in a statement.
Bali’s international airport operator PT Angkasa Pura Indonesia said it had conducted tests in its airspace and no volcanic ash was detected, saying the airport was “operating as normal.”
Lewotobi erupted again from midnight yesterday until early morning, and a large ash column could be seen pouring from its crater.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS