On Wednesday, November 13, 2024, Jetstar told passengers that every flight to and from Bali was cancelled until 12:00 Australian Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday. The reason sat about 500 kilometres east of the island: Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, on Flores, throwing ash into the sky.
For families planning a holiday in Bali, or heading home from one, the message was the same across several carriers. BBC News reported that Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin Australia all advised passengers that the ash made it unsafe to fly. Virgin Australia cancelled all of its Bali flights on Wednesday. “Safety is always our highest priority,” the airline said in a statement, adding that its meteorology team was watching the situation closely.
Airlines across Asia pull flights
Others followed. Cathay Pacific, IndiGo and AirAsia also cancelled flights, the BBC said. Singapore Airlines and its low-cost carrier Scoot scrubbed some services, though Singapore’s airport website still showed other Bali flights running on Wednesday.
Ahmad Syaugi Shahab, general manager of Bali’s international airport, told Reuters that 22 international flights and 12 domestic ones had been affected on Tuesday. He gave no figures for Wednesday. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology warned that the ash might also drift over parts of the country’s north.
The disruption reached beyond the airport. A jazz festival in the town of Labuan Bajo, some 600km from the volcano, was postponed to next year over safety concerns.
A week of eruptions
This was not a single blast. ABC News reported that the eruptions began on November 3 and continued through the weekend, and that Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation last logged an eruption on Tuesday night. At least nine people had been killed, dozens injured and more than 11,000 people evacuated, according to the ABC. The BBC put the death toll from the major eruption a week earlier at 10 and said the volcano sent a 9km (6.2 miles) ash column skyward over the weekend.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire” and has about 130 active volcanoes. Ash has grounded flights before: in 2020, clouds from Mount Merapi shut an airport in the city of Solo.
Flights return
By Thursday, November 14, services were coming back. Qantas Group and Virgin Australia confirmed to the ABC that flights were resuming. Virgin Australia said all scheduled flights in and out of Denpasar would operate again, and that it would keep contacting guests to put them on recovery flights over the coming days. Jetstar planned six flights to Bali that day, four of them scheduled and two ad hoc. Qantas planned three flights to Bali and three out.
Passengers with cancelled tickets were told they would be rebooked, or, in Virgin Australia’s case, could take a refund or flight credit if the new flight did not suit. Jetstar called it an “evolving situation” and warned that more disruption was possible.
Sources
- Flights in and out of Bali resume after Mount Lewotobi's Laki-Laki volcanic activity – ABC News
- Bali flights cancelled due to dangerous volcanic ash
