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Volcanic ash disrupted flights in southern Germany, Austria and parts of Spain and Portugal on Sunday but Italy reopened its airspace.Southern German airports in Munich, Stuttgart and some regional airstrips were closed at 1300 GMT until further notice, German air traffic control body DFS said.Austrian aviation agency Austro Control said it would shut down the nation's airports, most of them until early Monday morning, while its British equivalent NATS said airfields in the Scottish islands also closed on Sunday.The spread of ash from an erupting volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland grounded much of European air traffic for nearly a week in mid-April. Airlines had to cancel around 100,000 flights, stranding millions of passengers.Some 24,000 flights were expected to take place in European airspace on Sunday, about 1,000 (4 percent) below average for this time of year, an official at air traffic agency Eurocontrol said in Brussels.Transatlantic flights remain affected and are required to undergo significant rerouting, leading to some delays, the agency said earlier in a statement. "However, significant numbers of cancellations have not occurred."The number of flights in Europe on Saturday totalled 22,424, about 200 below normal levels, Eurocontrol said.Italian airports reopened from 1200 GMT on Sunday, following closure of a large part of the airspace in the north of the country in the morning, the civil aviation authority ENAC said.Airports in the eastern part of northern Italy and in Venice, Trieste and Rimini had remained open, ENAC said.Several northern Spanish airports, including Barcelona, reopened on Sunday after being shut on Saturday. But the Spanish civil aviation authority said a change in the direction of the ash cloud had forced them to close seven airports as 1400 GMT: Asturias, Santander, Bilbao, Salamanca, Valladolid, Leon and Burgos. All other airports were open.Ireland expects to impose restrictions to traffic at western airports later on Sunday as ash from the Icelandic volcano drifts back over the country.In Portugal, the airport in the country's second city, Porto, was shut until midday (1000 GMT), while the French aviation authority said some 30 flights from Paris to southern Europe were cancelled, although French skies were open.Volcanic ash is abrasive and can strip off aerodynamic surfaces and paralyse an aircraft engine. Aircraft electronics and windshields can also be damaged.An industry body, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), said airlines have lost more than $1.7 billion of revenue due to the volcano crisis, which will be reflected in earnings for the quarter through June.German flag carrier Lufthansa said it had lost nearly 200 million euros ($268.3 million) in total.(Reporting by Ludwig Burger, Maria Sheahan, Joern Poltz in Frankfurt, Rosalba O'Brien in London Massimiliano di Giorgio in Rome, Stephen Jewkes in Milan, Nigel Davies in Madrid, Dale Hudson in Brussels; editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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