Page 16 - Tom Aspell News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

The rest is completely shut down. >> tom, as i understand it, when the flights went, the pilots did everything on visual, right? they didn't rely on radar. they literally were looking around to have to deviate around ash clouds if they saw that? >> reporter: that's right, alex. the german planes flew at low altitude between frankfurt and munich observing what they call vor, visual flight rules. 20,000 and 30,000 feet. the dutch went higher but were deliberately trying to ingest as much of the ash cloud as they could to try to measure what effect it was having on the engines. the germans took n...

Them for after the lockdown ends. now the germans flew at low altitude under that cloud, which is between 20,000 and 40,000 feet. they were following about 12,000 feet on their route, observing visual flight rules all the way. now, that would not be impractical for the rest of europe to use that as a method of transporteding people around. it's just too dangerous to fly at low altitudes for long periods of time. and it wouldn't be fuel efficient. >> tom, are you getting any sense of a change of tenor from folks? it's one thing to have a trip extended by a day or two and perhaps over a weekend,...

And they are full of blame for the aviation authorities. they're saying that they should have left an air space clooer from london to the southeast on the first day of this crisis. they could have escaped then, they say, with their planes. and they're now saying, many of them having experience of flying through volcanic ash in asia and the caribbean, saying it's not as dangerous as the aviation experts are claiming. we could at least get the planes out to another destination and try and at least resume some kind of limited operations. but the way things are now with these planes stranded all o...

London's heathrow airport today. tom, with a good morning, i understand that klm just completed some sort of a test flight through an ash cloud. what happened there with that flight? >> reporter: well, both the dutch and german airliner looked at the dutch conducting test flights yesterday. they took a boeing 737 up to a height of 30,000 feet, and now they're examining the plane to see how much of an effect on the engines that the dust clouds has caused. the germans were primarily flying planes, ten, i believe, from frankfurt down to munich, the south of germany, just to reposition them for wh...

Alex? okay, thank you very much, tom aspell from heathrow. a geologist in iceland said activity's increased at the volcano, causing the ash to rise more than five miles in the sky. officials say that the winds have cleared visit for the scientists so today is the first day they'll be able to fly above the volcano and try to assess the activity a bit more closely. keep it here on "msnbc saturday," we'll have a live report from chris jansing in iceland just a few minutes from now. thousands of planes may be grounded because of that eruption, but air force one is due to take off later today o...