BRUSSELS — European airports sent thousands of planes into the sky on Thursday after a week of unprecedented disruptions, with airlines piling on more flights and bigger planes to try to get as many people home as possible.
Nearly all of the continent’s 28,000 scheduled flights, including more than 300 transatlantic routes, were going ahead.
Every plane was packed, however, as airlines squeezed in some of the hundreds of thousands who had been stranded for days among passengers with regular Thursday tickets.
Airlines said, despite their efforts, there was no quick and easy solution to cut down the backlog of passengers.
“Quite frankly, we don’t have an answer to this,” said David Henderson, spokesman for the Association of European Airlines, which predicted it would take several days to get all stranded passengers to their destinations. “We don’t know where they are and in what numbers, so we would expect it will go on into the early part of next week.”
Shifting winds sent a new plume of volcanic ash over Scandinavia, forcing some airports to close again. The new airspace restrictions applied to parts of northern Scotland, southern Norway, Sweden and Finland, said Kyla Evans, spokeswoman for Eurocontrol, the European air-traffic agency.
