While air traffic disruptions reached post-9/11 levels across the UK and most of Europe and the North Atlantic overnight, Qantas took a full 16 hours to get its head around the enormity of the volcanic ash situation.

The airline persisted until mid-morning with advice to passengers that its flights to Europe and the UK had not been cancelled and that they should go to the airports as normal.

They are now all cancelled, like all other carrier flights to the UK and most of Europe. The U-turn, documented on Plane Talking, saw the airline comprehensively out-performed by its kangaroo route competitors who by early last night had posted prominent and detailed flight advisories on their websites.

Qantas.com didn’t even provide an obvious link to its out-of-date information on the consequences of the Icelandic volcanic ash plume until about 8am eastern Australian time.

Compared to the carrier’s comprehensive response to the 9/11 diversions and cancellations, it was a pitiful performance and reflects poorly on Qantas’ prevailing corporate culture.

It is unclear when the volcanic ash clouds will disperse sufficiently for safe transits of European air space. Even if the clouds disperse rapidly, there are tens of thousands of dislocated passengers and their jets stranded at intermediate locations such as Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Dubai.

Restoring airline schedules will take some time, something even Qantas now recognises.

The problem with volcanic ash is that it comprises gritty and glassy particles that were molten when they were blasted at the rate of tens of tonnes per second out of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption for two days earlier this week.

Jet engine combustion replicates the temperatures and pressures of a pit of volcanic magma. When a jet or turbo prop engine ingests the cooled particles of gritty dust they melt them again, coating the internal surfaces of the engines with what in lay terms is hot volcanic glass.

In short, volcanic dust kills jet engines. They are almost always irreparable afterwards, assuming there is an afterwards. When volcanic grit is struck at mach 0.82, the typical cruising speed of your average A380 or 777, it behaves like a high pressure sand blaster, and can quickly destroy visibility through cockpit windows.

In 1982, two 747s, one flown by British Airways and the other by Singapore Airlines,  lost power without warning passing through an ash plume at night from Indonesia’s Mount Galunggung volcano.  Both flights were saved by engine restarts and emergency diversions, and a KLM 747 suffered a similar crisis in an Alaskan ash plume in 1989.

Since then airlines have been ultra sensitive to flying anywhere likely to be affected by volcanic ash.

The Icelandic eruption is predicted to colour and even slightly cool  much of the world for long after this disruption to air travel is over.

The large Eyjafjallajokull ejection of massive plumes of volcanic ash earlier this week was no Tambora (1815) or even Mount St Helens (1980) in terms of volumes  but at the very least meteorologists and vulcanologists in Europe are predicting it will bring vivid long lasting sunsets and a bit of a chill to parts of the northern world for months to come and perhaps affect southern skies in due course.

The last such colourful and cooling event in older living memory followed the February, March and May 1963 eruptions of Mt Agung on Bali, the most powerful of which on March 17, killed 1500 people.

This caused prolonged richly coloured twilights from sulphate particles suspended in the upper stratosphere before dawn and after sunsets in Australia throughout the latter part of the year and well into 1964.  The skies were ablaze with colour when they should have been dark because the reflective particles extended well over 20,000 metres in altitude.  By day they were either invisible or barely detectable to the naked eye, just like the current Icelandic ash cloud over Europe.

The Agung clouds also coincided with two successive winters that included abnormally cold and snowy outbreaks in south-east Australia, including briefly settled snow in parts of the Queensland interior, north of the tropic of Capricorn, settled snow within the Sydney basin, on locations such as the Razorback Mountain and Appin, and very deep and longer-lasting falls  on ranges where snowfalls are usually light and transient,  or once-in-a-century events.

In 1965 heavy-duty snowploughs were brought down from the closing stages of the Snowy Mountains scheme to cut trough the drifts, in places more than three metres deep, blocking the Monaro highway south of Canberra. At one stage, steam locomotives were used to help clean the electrified line over the Blue Mountains.

The fear also being reported in Europe is that Eyjafjallajokull may trigger an eruption in the nearby and far larger dormant Mt Katla volcano.

The Mt Tambora eruption on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa  on April 10, 1815, reduced a towering stratovolcano 4300 metres high to the sometimes smoking  2851-metre tall remnant it is today in one of the most catastrophic natural explosions known to have occurred in the past 10,000 years.

It killed an estimated 71,000 people, mostly from starvation caused by the destruction of agriculture, in what was then a lightly populated Indonesian archipelago, and pumped plumes of sulphate particles into the air that were so dense and reflective of incoming solar radiation that they are blamed for causing the “Year without Winter” in 1816 in North America and Europe.

This, in turn, caused a massive famine in Europe from crop failures, and widespread civil disorders over food shortages.  Drifting falls of fresh snow accumulated on the northern American prairies during June of that year.

The 1816 freeze also came in the middle of a deep cold spell called the Dalton Minimum, which began in 1790 and extended to about 1829 and coincided with a set of low solar minimums, which were preceded by a solar cycle of 13 rather than the normal 11 years, something that was replicated between the past two solar minimums of 1996 and 2009.