Jakarta's airport is open again, after a shutdown that stranded 340,000 people

Soekarno-Hatta International Airport started handling flights again early on Tuesday, along with four other airports near the capital and on Java, the transport ministry said. That leaves three of the eight closed airports still shut. The scale of the shutdown only became clear as it ended: almost 3,000 flights were disrupted and more than 340,000 passengers were stranded, the South China Morning Post reports. What began on Saturday as a few hours of closed runways ran into a third day.

Anak Krakatau sits about 150km from Jakarta, in the water between Java and Sumatra, so the mountain itself was never the danger to the capital. The wind was. Ash drifts, and airports reopen only when the cloud has moved off the approach paths, which is why the closures kept rolling forward one morning at a time rather than ending on a fixed date. "Following the current volcanic eruption activity of Mount Anak Krakatoa, Soekarno-Hatta International Airport has resumed flight operations," the airport authority said.

Reopening is not the same as catching up. Aircraft and crews are now in the wrong cities, and airlines have to move them back before they can clear the backlog of people who missed connections over the weekend. Rebooking that many passengers takes days, not hours, and seats out of Jakarta will be scarce and expensive for the rest of the week. The three airports still closed are the ones nearest the ash, and they will follow the same rule: the wind decides.

Why it matters

If your flight was cancelled since Saturday, contact your airline before going to the airport, because a reopened runway does not mean your seat has been reissued. Anyone booking a trip in the next week should expect higher fares and thinner availability out of Jakarta while carriers clear the queue. And the mountain is still erupting, so the same closure can happen again on any morning the wind turns toward Java.