Italy's Catania airport remains closed August 15 due to Mount Etna eruption

Flights at Catania airport in Sicily will remain suspended until Saturday afternoon because of ash from Mount Etna's ongoing volcanic activity, which has forced hundreds of flights to be cancelled or rerouted over the past week.

All arrivals and departures at the island hub, Italy's fifth-busiest airport by passenger traffic, will be suspended through 3 p.m. (1300 GMT) on August 15, airport operator SAC said in a statement on Friday.

Passengers were advised to check the status of their flights with their airlines before travelling to the airport.

The prolonged restrictions come at the height of the summer holiday season, affecting thousands of passengers, and have placed additional pressure on Sicily's other airports.

Mount Etna, Europe's highest and most active volcano, frequently disrupts operations at Catania airport, whose operator launched the sale of a stake of at least 51% in May.

Volcanic ash is considered one of the most serious hazards to aviation because it can damage aircraft systems and cause jet engines to fail. In 1982 a British Airways Boeing 747 temporarily lost power in all four engines after flying through an ash cloud from Indonesia's Mount Galunggung before the crew safely restarted them.

THE MOST SEVERE DISRUPTION IN TWO DECADES

The current disruption is the most severe to affect Catania airport in at least two decades, according to SAC sources quoted by Italian news agency ANSA.

Between August 6 and 12 more than a third of the 1,974 flights scheduled at Catania were cancelled, with around 630 flights diverted to other airports.

Thousands of travellers have been stranded by the prolonged closure, with some spending days inside the terminal sleeping wherever they can and passing the time playing cards.

"We were due to leave on Wednesday, but our flight was cancelled; then they rescheduled it for Friday. Now that one's been cancelled too," said Antonella Thirande Warnakulasuriya Costa, from the Sicilian city of Messina, who is travelling to Sri Lanka via Dubai.

Matheus Paulo Neto, from Joao Pessoa in Brazil, said repeated schedule changes had turned the end of his holiday into a frustrating ordeal.

"Our flight has been changed twice and we are trying to get to (the Sardinian city of) Olbia, but nobody has helped us. We don't have any information, just emails that don't explain everything about the changes," he said.

The forced closure has reignited a long-running debate in Sicily over whether the island's main eastern airport is too vulnerable to Mount Etna's frequent eruptions.

"It is hard to deny that the events of recent days point to one conclusion: it is not the volcano that is in the wrong place, but the airport," Civil Protection Minister and former Sicily governor Nello Musumeci said in a statement.

"The issue is real and deserves serious, long-term reflection in the planning of major infrastructure," he added.

-Additional reporting and writing by Giselda Vagnoni and Gavin Jones; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Toby Chopra/Reuters