Nom (or lack of it) de Plume
Well, the trip to Ireland for my father's 80th birthday party was a bust; no flights and an abortive attempt to get to Holyhead overland and take the ferry only served to reinforce my dislike for the town of Crewe.
As hardships go, I'd call it minimal. Others are stranded a continent away and facing financial exhaustion from the hotel bills and their enforced absence from work.
Eurostar are stepping up to the challenge and putting on extra trains. Other rail companies, predictably, are not: it's all but impossible to lay on extra services under the UK's botched railway franchising regime, but Arriva trains' wilful refusal to put extra carriages on services with a known overcrowding problem would be criminal if it wasn't perfectly legal by design.
At a guess, I'd say that Virgin and Arriva sold between three and five times as many tickets for travel on Saturday, for the Holyhead run, as they have seats and standing room on the services they ran. But, as I know to my cost, we do not compel passengers to board overcrowded trains. Again, that would be fraudulent if it wasn't explicitly permitted by law.
The ferry companies were overwhelmed - on Cross-Channel runs as well as on the Irish Sea - and will be for some time: chartering ferries isn't as simple as putting extra rolling-stock onto the railway, because ro-ro ferries are built to order for specific routes and there's no charter market the way there is for 'generic' vessels like bulk carriers and container ships. Even if there were - and Stena could well pull ships off less-profitable Baltic services - it takes days or even weeks to move the ships.
The question is: how long is this going on? Long enough to justify investments and redeployments by transport providers?
Volcanoes are unpredictable: Eyjafjallajökull probably won't stop tomorrow, but it might calm down in a week or two. Or it could go on for a year or two.
Even if it goes on for years, it's too small to repeat the climate effects of the Laki eruption, but an eruption lasting months will force a change in flight patterns. An eruption lasting a week will lead to lead to layoffs in the air industry: come Tuesday or Wednesday morning, all the short-term contract workers in the outsourced services will be out of work - as will many of the pilots.
Is it possible to fly at all with a new time of 'weather' - ash safety ceilings - rather than blanket bans?
Of course it is. We'll see more turboprops on short-haul flights, as their fuel-efficiency is less sensitive to altitude (annoyingly, Aer Arann and other turboprop operators were not allowed to fly this weekend) and they may well displace the Boeing 737, the turbofan-powered workhorse of the short-to-medium haul sector. The Liverpool-Heathrow run is economical in a 737 with a 20,000-foot ceiling imposed by Air Traffic Control, but the word from commercial pilots is that you simply cannot run a revenue-generating flight any lower than that. It's telling that the Manchester shuttle flies at 41,000 feet, as do similar runs along the Pacific Coast of the USA: airlines do not fly below 30,000 feet if they can possibly avoid it, even on a 25-minute flight. I think they will run short-hauls at L150, but these flights are going to carry eye-watering fuel surcharges on 'Ash Wednesdays'.
That means costs will rise and - I hope - that long-distance rail will be permitted to take up the slack.
Medium-haul flights will be another matter: if a two-hundred-Euro surcharge becomes a fifty-fifty probability on every flight, expect a drastic pruning of the timetable and higher baseline fares
Long-haul flights have a far more uncertain outlook. It's not just about the economics of a less fuel-efficient flight profile; I suspect that long-haul aircraft simply do not have the fuel capacity fly the first 500 miles at 15,000 feet before climbing to an efficient altitude. I would be grateful if a qualified pilot or Flight Despatcher could 'do the numbers'.
The economic effects of all this? Get used to seeing less exotic fruit and veg in the shops. Get used to waiting for that iPad to come to Europe in a shipping container, instead of overnight despatch. High-value electronic goods are economical to shift by air freight because of the cost-of-carry of the money tied up in them, so chip foundries and phone manufacturers (and high-end pharmaceutical companies) are going to see a shift in the economics of their business...
...In the medium term. Short-term, their supply chains are screwed, and we're going to see that play out in the next ten days. It'll be ugly.