Out of Office: Finding the Silver Lining in a Volcanic Ash Cloud

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers and members share their business travel advice and stories from life on the road. Read all the posts here.

Early on the morning of April 15, 2010, we were flying into Stockholm for a 90-minute meeting with a public company's board of directors to pitch for a CEO executive search. We didn't pay much attention to the talk about the gigantic Eyjafjallaj?kull volcano exploding in Iceland. The seemingly remote event might be a scientific curiosity but surely it wouldn't affect us. Of course, how wrong we were. What was to be an in-and-out trip ended up being a weeklong exercise in adaptability, patience, adventure, and a fresh reminder of the pleasures of experiencing travel on a human scale.

After our meeting in downtown Stockholm, we headed back to the airport. By about noon, the information boards were showing flights being cancelled one after the other in rapid succession. The crowds swelled and tempers were starting to flare as disoriented passengers got confusing answers and contradictory information from airline officials. Jerry Noonan, my Spencer Stuart partner who leads our global consumer practice, and I were lucky to squeeze onto a flight out, but instead of a return to the U.S., the best we could do was get to Amsterdam. Our logic was that with the ash plume heading down from the north, if we could get south then we had a chance of catching an alternative flight home.

When we disembarked in Schiphol airport (Europe’s fourth busiest), it had the feeling of a war zone. People were camped out everywhere, tuned into the video monitors showing images of the eruption and cable news talking heads giving expert commentary about how the volcanic ash would damage aircraft engines. If you could get to the front of a line to talk to a customer service agent, he or she would refer you to the airline information hotline or website. But then, if you were lucky enough to connect over the overwhelmed phone and data networks, you were referred back to the information agents in the airport. Clearly they had no idea what was happening either. With no reliable answers coming from official sources, information was transmitted word-of-mouth as a game of telephone and in response to the surging queues across the airport.

This circular pattern of non-information — from airline officials pointing people to their websites and websites referring passengers back to the help desks — would continue for a week. What was clear was that while already high anxieties were escalating in the shadow of continuous network footage of the volcano’s eruption and its expanding ash cloud blanketing Europe, no one was going anywhere by plane for the foreseeable future.

Jerry and I made a couple of decisions that served us well during our saga (and to this day). First, since there was literally nothing we could do to change the situation, we chose to accept it and make the best of it. We embraced the experience and tried to have some fun. We vowed never to take an escalator in an airport or train station.

We purchased the bare necessities to keep functioning (toiletries, electrical adaptors, and running gear to keep exercising wherever we happened to be), but we stayed light and agile in our movements.

We kept in touch with our families and the office — they too were following the unfolding drama.

We met scores of intrepid travelers as well, sharing stories and strategies. We took standing-room only trains from Amsterdam to Brussels to Frankfurt and found what was surely the last room in the freight section of the airport (there were thousands of stranded truckers unable to offload their cargo). We continued south on overnight trains through the Alps in Switzerland and into Italy, ultimately making it all the way down to Rome where we camped out for a couple of days. Finally, after about a week, the airports gradually reopened starting in the south and making their way to the north.

We traveled some 1,500 miles by train and bus before getting on the flight home. In the end, we were just two of millions of passengers stranded by what became the largest air-traffic shutdown since World War II. Everyone had their own story, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, who evidently was coming home from San Francisco and who also made it to Rome but then had to take a bulletproof limo from Italy back to Germany.

Like the tale of the fish that got away, the scale of our epic adventure grew in the months to follow to epic proportions. But the reality was that we were safe, we ended up getting home, and in the process rediscovered the joys of overland travel. We were also reminded about just how powerless and insignificant we all can be.

Check out Wikipedia's take on the ash cloud of 2010.

Photo: creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by Sverrir Thorolfsson