Iceland Raises Volcano Aviation Alert Again

An anonymous reader writes Iceland's authorities have raised an aviation warning for a region close to the Bardarbunga volcano after a small fissure eruption in the area. The eruption began around 0600 GMT prompting the Icelandic Met Office to raise the aviation warning code to red for the Bardarbunga/Holuhraun area, the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said in a statement. The country's meteorological agency described the eruption as a "very calm lava eruption and can hardly be seen on seismometers."

Doesn't affect just people flying to/from Iceland

[Anonymous Coward]

This can affect a lot of planes flying to and from Europe, and can cost airlines millions of dollars in cancellations, delays, and rerouted flights. However it is imperative that airlines avoid the area as ash can wreak havoc on a jet engine and its turbine blades. Best case scenario is the engine flames out and can be restarted once the ash cloud is exited; worst case is that it cannot be restarted and if you lose multiple engines you might wind up losing the aircraft.

Bah, character-set ignorance.

[jeffb (2.718)]

I feel embarrassed every time I see an English-language site render this as "Bardarbunga", when that "d" should be "th". Yes, the letter "eth" looks like a lowercase d with a crossbar and erectile dysfunction, but it's pronounced like "th".

They should render the a-with-diacritic as "au", too. (Maybe even take the "g" to a "k".) But while there's a long and stupid tradition of dropping diacritics without rewriting the vowel, there's no damn excuse for getting it this badly wrong when you've got to replace a letter that simply doesn't exist in your target alphabet.