BERLIN - Air controllers in Germany say that all restrictions for the country's airspace have been lifted. Deutsche Flugsicherung said Wednesday that the current weather situation allowed it to completely reopen the airspace above Germany ��" among Europe's busiest in normal situations. A statement from the agency said the concentration of volcano ash in the sky "considerably decreased and will continue to dwindle because of the weather conditions." All German airports, including Frankfurt International, a key global hub, are expected to operate normally by the end of the day, it said. Airlines have lost at least $1.7 billion due to travel disruptions caused by the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, an industry group said Wednesday as hundreds of planes finally landed or took off from airports around Europe. The head of the International Air Transport Association called the situation "devastating" and urged European governments to examine ways to compensate airlines for lost revenues, as the U.S. government did following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Airlines lost revenues of $400 million each day during the first three days of grounding, IATA chief executive Giovanni Bisignani told a news conference in Berlin. At one stage, 29 per cent of global aviation and 1.2 million passengers a day were affected by the airspace closure ordered by European governments, who feared the risk that volcanic ash could pose to airplanes. "For an industry that lost $9.4 billion last year and was forecast to lose a further $2.8 billion in 2010, this crisis is devastating," Bisignani said. "Governments should help carriers recover the cost of this disruption." He noted that "the scale of the crisis eclipsed 9/11, when US airspace was closed for three days." Flights resumed in many areas, but the situation was anything but normal as airlines worked through an enormous backlog after canceling over 95,000 flights in the last week.
