…or you won’t ever leave (or reach) this island! It seems that in an effort to help all readers from other countries, I neglected updating those interested in the situation in Iceland’s air space. I must thank one of our readers for pointing this out. There is a reason for this, which might sound surprising to those who are visiting this website for the first time: the ash cloud caused more problems to air traffic in the rest of Europe than in Iceland, for the time being. Keflavík International Airport, Iceland’s main airport, is open, but of course all flights to and from Iceland have been cancelled elsewhere. Thus, the table of arrivals and departures on the website of the airport shows a rather monotonous list of “cancelled” international flights. This means that, in Reykjavík, you can find plenty of tourists who had to stay in Iceland for longer than they had planned.
For the aforementioned reasons, Icelandic domestic flights are the only ones still flying today. Air Iceland, the main company offering domestic flights (even though there are plenty of others that offer various means of air transportation), lists at the time of this writing one cancelled flight to the Westman Islands, but no cancellations or major delays on domestic flights.
The two main Icelandic airlines offering international flights, Iceland Express and Icelandair, both are reporting cancellations of most or all their flights, even those with destinations outside Europe. In fact, due to the unpredictability of winds (in Iceland the weather changes every 5 minutes, without exaggerating), flights leaving countries like the U.S. might find a very different condition at Keflavík at the time of their arrival than the one at the time of their departure. You really do not want to be on board a plane that has nowhere to land in the Northern Atlantic.
Icelandair (aka Iceland Air), issued this press release today:
“Icelandair passengers flying from U.S destinations, who are either all ready IN Iceland, or planning to travel TO Iceland today, Saturday April 17th, please note that onward travel to Europe is currently impossible due to the closure of European airspace and prospects are uncertain.
Looking ahead to the next hours and days, the prospects of uninterrupted travel to and from Iceland, both to Europe and the U.S., are highly uncertain.
We strongly advice all our passenger originating in the U.S. already in Iceland to TRAVEL BACK to the U.S on Icelandair flights as soon as possible or if still in the U.S. to POSTPONE their plans of travelling to Iceland for onward travel to Europe.”
Iceland Express, which is considered the low-cost Icelandic airline (even though this is not always true, in my experience), is also reporting cancellation and delay of all their flights.
All flights from companies based in other countries coming to Iceland have also been cancelled.