Anak Krakatau ash over Jakarta airports: 373 flights affected as of 10:35
Five Indonesian airports have extended or ordered closures due to the spread of volcanic ash. Soekarno-Hatta alone counts 202 flights affected, of which 167 cancelled. The report currently comes from a single institutional source.
The report currently comes from a single source — the Directorate General of Air Transportation of the Indonesian Ministry of Transportation — and no independent confirmation is available. Since this is the authority that materially orders the closures, it is a primary source: but it remains a single voice, and the figures reported here are those it has communicated.
At 10:35 WIB on September 6, western Indonesia time, the authority recorded 373 flights affected by the airport closures linked to ash emitted by Anak Krakatau.
The airports and the schedules
| Airport | Closure extended until | Flights |
|---|---|---|
| Soekarno-Hatta (Jakarta) | 13:30 WIB (from 08:30) | 202 affected, 167 cancelled |
| Halim Perdanakusuma | 14:00 WIB | 29 cancelled |
| Radin Inten II | 14:00 WIB | 8 cancelled |
| Budiarto | 13:30 WIB | — |
| Pondok Cabe | 14:00 WIB | — |
To these is added Husein Sastranegara airport in Bandung, where the paper test returned a positive result for the presence of volcanic ash: at the time of the communication, the issuance of the NOTAM, the notice that formalizes the closure for operators, was expected.
Why ash grounds planes and clouds do not
The distinction the authority applies is between the visible plume and the dispersion of ash along flight routes and over runways. The paper test cited for Bandung serves precisely to establish whether particulate matter is settling on the ground in the airport area: it is a material check, and the administrative decision to close or reopen depends on it. Reopenings, consequently, do not follow a schedule but the result of subsequent checks, which is the reason why the times indicated in the table were extended several times over the course of the morning.
The flight count, it should be read carefully, is not uniform: for Soekarno-Hatta the authority distinguishes between flights affected (202) and flights cancelled (167), while for the other two airports it provides only the cancellation figure. The 373 flights are the overall figure recorded at 10:35, that is, an intermediate snapshot of the morning and not a tally for the day.
What we do not know
We do not know the height of the eruptive column nor the volcano’s activity parameters: the aviation authority’s communication concerns the consequences for air traffic, not volcanology. We do not know whether evacuations or measures for coastal populations have been ordered, nor whether there is damage on the ground. We do not know how many passengers were stranded, since the number of flights does not automatically translate into a number of people, and no figure of this kind has been released.
Finally, the expected duration of the disruption is not known: the closures indicated were set to expire in the early local afternoon, and their extension depends on subsequent checks. The next verifiable element will be the update from the Directorate General of Air Transportation with the results of the tests at the affected airports and the possible NOTAM for Bandung.
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