(Reuters) – Airline industry group IATA criticized Europe's response to a volcanic ash cloud and called on Monday for urgent steps to reopen airspace after five days of closures that have cost airlines $250 million a day.

IATA head Giovanni Bisignani said authorities in Europe had “missed opportunities to fly safely”.

“This volcano has crippled the aviation sector, firstly in Europe and is now having worldwide implications. The scale of the economic impact (on aviation) is now greater than 9/11 when U.S. airspace was closed for three days,” Bisignani said, referring to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

“We must move away from this blanket closure and find ways to flexibly open air space, step by step,” he told a news briefing in Paris.

European transport ministers are due to discuss the airspace crisis at 9 a.m. ET after a meeting of the European aviation control agency Eurocontrol, which said on Monday it expected between 8,000 and 9,000 flights to operate in Europe.

That would represent just 30 percent of normal flight traffic, and marks only a modest increase from Saturday and Sunday, when less than 25 percent of flights operated. Since Thursday at least 63,000 flights have been canceled.

Austria opened its airports on Monday but other countries kept no-fly decrees in place. Italy closed its northern airspace after briefly opening it on Monday.

The closure of most of Europe´s airspace because of a huge cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano stranded millions of passengers, and importers and exporters have been hit.

The crisis has had a knock-on effect across the world and its impact on everyday life in Europe has deepened. In Britain, companies reported staff had been unable to get back from Easter holidays abroad and hospitals said they were cancelling some operations because surgeons were stuck in far off places.

Britain's official weather forecaster the Met Office released a graphic predicting little movement of the ash plume over Europe on Monday, but saw it spreading toward the eastern seaboard of North America.

“The wind flow is staying very much the same through the day. Probably for the next three of four days the wind regime is not going to change terribly much,” a Met Office spokesman said.

Bisignani called for urgent action to safely re-open airspace and called for a meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations aviation body.

“We have to make decisions based on the real situation and not on theoretical models. They (the authorities) have missed opportunities to fly safely,” he said.

A senior European Union official said on Sunday the current situation was not sustainable, as airlines called for a review of no-fly decrees after conducting test flights at the weekend without any apparent problems from the ash cloud.

“We cannot wait until the ash flows just disappear,” said EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas, adding he hoped 50 percent of European airspace would be risk-free on Monday.

Dutch airline KLM, which has flown several test flights, said most European airspace was safe despite the plume of ash, and dispatched two commercial freight flights to Asia on Sunday.

Volcanic ash is abrasive and can strip off aerodynamic surfaces and paralyze an aircraft engine. Aircraft electronics and windshields can also be damaged.

via Airline body seeks moves to reopen Europe airspace | Reuters.