Etna Ash Keeps Catania Airport Shut Until Saturday, Stranding Thousands

Catania airport in Sicily will keep its arrival gates shut until early Saturday, extending a week-long travel crisis caused by ash from Mount Etna's ongoing eruption. The operator, SAC, said late Thursday that all inbound flights would remain suspended until 2 a.m. local time on August 15, urging passengers to confirm flight status with airlines before heading to the terminal.

The prolonged closure has hit at the worst possible time, colliding with the peak of the summer holiday season. Between August 6 and 12, roughly 630 flights were diverted to other airports, while more than a third of the 1,974 flights originally scheduled at Catania were cancelled. The disruption is the most severe the airport has faced in at least two decades, according to SAC sources.

Thousands of travellers have been left stranded, with some spending days inside the terminal, sleeping on floors and passing time with card games. Antonella Thirande Warnakulasuriya Costa, from Messina, described a cascade of cancellations that kept pushing back her trip to Sri Lanka via Dubai. Matheus Paulo Neto, a Brazilian tourist, said his flight had been changed twice and that he was struggling to get information about reaching Olbia.

Volcanic ash is a serious hazard for aviation, capable of damaging aircraft systems and causing engines to fail. The current crisis has also reignited a long-running debate about whether Catania's location makes it too vulnerable to Etna's frequent activity. Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci, a former Sicily governor, said the recent events suggest the airport, not the volcano, is in the wrong place, and called for serious long-term reflection on infrastructure planning.