It all seems very surreal at the moment, most European airspace closed for business, no joke for the aviation industry, but also having a big impact on other businesses. As an e-business in theory we aren’t very affected, the good thing about the internet is that international delivery is usually when you hit “send” on an e-mail. We work with clients and suppliers in many countries, and some parts of the world are completely unaffected. At a human level, many people in the UK are affected, people stuck overseas unable to get back from holidays, businesses unable to send people on international travel.

We are directly affected in that we have a new member of staff due to start next week, on an EU funded graduate placement programme, hopefully Maren will be able to get here soon, but her flight has already been canceled for the weekend. Many of our clients are directly affected as they are working in different global markets, and need to move staff around. Hopefully the disruption won’t carry on a long time, but weather reports seem to be suggesting that it will carry on for a while.

International readers who haven’t seen the news might wonder what this is all about. The BBC website is a good source of news on the subject, including latest updates. There has been a major eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull, a volcano in Iceland, and it has spread volcanic ash through the atmosphere in much of western Europe. You may get the idea that we are under a dense cloud of ash, but it is nothing like it, the concentration in the atmosphere is very low, the problem is that it is dangerous to jet engines.

Our hope is that the situation will improve soon, and that things will return to normal.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 12:18 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.