BRUSSELS - European airports sent thousands of planes into the sky Thursday after a week of unprecedented disruptions, but shifting winds sent a new plume of volcanic ash over Scandinavia, forcing some airports in Norway and Sweden to close again. The new airspace restrictions applied to northern Scotland and parts of southern Norway, Sweden and Finland, said Kyla Evans, spokeswoman for Eurocontrol, the European air traffic agency. But nearly all of the continent's 28,000 other scheduled flights, including more than 300 flights on lucrative trans-Atlantic routes, were going ahead. Every plane was packed, however, as airlines squeezed in some of the hundreds of thousands of travelers who had been stranded for days among passengers with regular Thursday tickets. Airlines said there was no quick solution to cut down the backlog of passengers, for most flights were nearly full anyway and no other planes were available. "Quite frankly we don't have an answer to this," said David Henderson, spokesman for the Association of European Airlines. Some travelers got a break. Authorities chartered a luxury cruise ship ��" the Celebrity Eclipse ��" to pick up 2,200 tourists in the northern Spanish port of Bilbao on Thursday and bring them back to England. A British Royal Navy ship also arrived in Portsmouth, southern England, carrying 440 troops coming home from Afghanistan and 280 civilians back from Santander, Spain. All of British airspace was open and major airports such as London's Heathrow ��" Europe's busiest ��" were operating nearly full schedules but airlines still warned passengers to check first. British Airways said all of its flights London's Gatwick and City airports would take off, as well as the "vast majority" of flights from Heathrow. Many trans-Atlantic planes flying between the United States and Europe were assigned flight paths above the ash cloud that still covered the area east of Iceland. Flying at over 35,000 feet (10,670 meters), the planes were well above the current maximum altitude of the ash, which lingered in some places at 20,000 feet (6,100 metres).
