Catania airport closed: Etna shut it at least four times in 2026, and no one publishes the closure hours

The closures exist as a string of notices, and no one keeps the log

The 2026 closures came in at least four episodes, plus shorter restrictions. None of the sources read for this report lists them all. The timeline below is assembled from operator statements quoted by the press, Reuters and Il Post, with the source and its status on every row.

The first episode came in early July. On 7 July, Open reported that SAC had extended a full suspension of arrivals and departures until 14:00 that day, after volcanic activity during the night of 6 to 7 July. Comiso, the smaller airport in the south-east of Sicily that SAC also runs, stayed open. Headlines from 5 and 6 July describe diversions and earlier deadlines. The reopening time was not established in the documents read.

The August episode was the longest. Etna's activity began on 6 August, according to Marco Viccaro, president of the Italian Volcanological Association, quoted by Reuters on 13 August. An INGV communiqué of 7 August described a lava fountain at the Voragine crater and a new eruptive vent in the Valle del Bove, without mentioning aviation or the airport. Flights ran under stop-and-go restrictions from about 7 August. On 12 August SAC suspended all arrivals and departures until 02:00 on 14 August, according to Il Post. SAC then extended the suspension to 02:00 on 15 August, according to Reuters, and to 15:00 on 15 August, according to Il Post. Flights restarted at 14:00 local time on 15 August, after the aviation alert was lowered from red to orange, Reuters reported. Arrivals were still capped on 17 August, according to the trade site Qualitytravel.

September brought two more closures. Il Post reported that the airport closed on the morning of Monday 14 September, after INGV raised its aviation alert from orange to red, and that flights resumed on the evening of Tuesday 15 September. On Saturday 26 September arrivals were cut from ten to four an hour, then stopped, with flights diverted to Palermo, Comiso and Trapani, according to Virgilio. Il Post reported that the airport reopened at about 20:00 on Monday 28 September after three days of closure. The next morning flights were suspended again from 09:30, briefly, before SAC said the airport was operating.

The only official flight count covers the August week. A SAC note of 13 August, reproduced by BlogSicilia and Italiavola & Travel, said "circa 1.974 voli" were scheduled at Catania between 6 and 12 August. About 36% were cancelled and about 630 were diverted. That puts the cancellations at about 711 flights, on our arithmetic. The remaining flights, roughly 630 on our arithmetic, operated at Catania. SAC said Comiso, Palermo and Trapani absorbed part of the traffic. It gave no number for each airport.

Other counts circulate, and they cover other windows. Il Post reported on 14 August that Anna Quattrone, SAC's president, said about 1,900 flights were scheduled in the previous eight days, that 36% were cancelled, and that 630 were diverted, 140 of them to Comiso. Il Post turned the 36% into 684 cancelled flights. That number comes from the rounded base. On 12 August Il Post reported that about 700 flights were affected between 8 and 11 August, of which 450 were cancelled and about 250 were rescheduled to other airports. That is a different window and a different measure. It is not 450 cancellations out of 700 scheduled flights.

The categories also differ in what they include. In SAC's note, a diverted flight is one planned for Catania that landed or departed elsewhere. In Il Post's 12 August report, about 250 flights were rescheduled to other airports and counted separately from the 450 cancellations. Il Post's 14 August report put 140 of SAC's 630 diverted flights at Comiso. Qualitytravel, citing SAC data via ANSA, said that of more than 250 flights rescheduled between 8 and 11 August, more than 100 went to Comiso, about 50 to Palermo and 22 to Trapani. None of these breakdowns covers the whole of August, and none covers the September closures, for which no flight counts were found.

No source counts closure days. A Sicilian aviation site published a headline in September saying flights had been suspended for 13 days in 2026. Its page could not be opened, and the headline gives no method. No operator or authority has published a figure to check it against. INGV publishes aviation notices for Etna, but its archive was not read for this report, and an aviation alert is not the same as a closure. The airport sometimes stayed open under a red alert with limited arrivals and sometimes closed sectors without closing completely.

Closures were not all-or-nothing. On several days SAC closed named airspace sectors, such as C1 and B3 in mid-August (Quotidiano.net and L'Espresso, 13–14 August) and C1 again on 26 September (Virgilio), or limited arrivals to a few an hour while departures continued. Those partial restrictions disrupted schedules without being recorded as closures in any count. A day with arrivals capped at four an hour and a day with no flights at all look the same in a list of dates.

SAC described the August episode as "la più severa degli ultimi 20 anni in termini di impatto sull'infrastruttura aeroportuale", the most severe in 20 years in terms of impact on the airport. Reuters carried the same claim from SAC sources quoted by the news agency ANSA. It is the operator's assessment. No published series of closure hours for earlier years exists to test it.

Catania lost about 480,000 passengers in two months, and the gains elsewhere cannot be separated from growth

Passenger data are the one systematic measure of the closures' effect, and they are monthly. Assaeroporti publishes passengers for 41 Italian airports each month. Its figures include direct transit passengers. In August 2026 Catania handled 1,001,412 passengers, down 22.6%, according to Assaeroporti's August table as published by AVIONEWS and StrettoWeb on 30 September. In September it handled 1,044,124, down 15.4%, according to Assaeroporti's statistics page. Over January to September it handled 9,239,159, down 3.3%.

The national comparison makes the gap plain. Italy's 41 airports handled 25,815,995 passengers in August, up 5.9%, and 23,928,665 in September, up 6.5%, on the same Assaeroporti series. Its August result was 28.5 percentage points below the national rate (ours). Before the closures, Catania was the fifth-busiest airport in the country and the largest in southern Italy after Naples.

Working back from the published percentages, Catania handled about 1,293,814 passengers in August 2025 and about 1,234,189 in September 2025. The losses were about 292,402 in August and about 190,065 in September, or about 482,467 over the two months. These are our derived figures. They are approximate, because the percentages are rounded to one decimal place.

Before August, Catania was growing. Its January to July 2026 passengers come to 7,193,623 on the Assaeroporti figures, against about 7,026,453 a year earlier, an increase of about 167,170, or 2.4% (ours). If August and September had grown at that rate, Catania would have handled about 323,000 more passengers in August and about 219,000 more in September than it did (ours). That measures the shortfall against the airport's own trend. It assumes the trend would have continued, which no source can confirm.

July shows little. On a derivation that mixes two press reports of Assaeroporti data, Catania handled about 1,269,115 passengers in July 2026, roughly 0.9% more than in July 2025 (ours). July included the early-July closure. The monthly figure cannot isolate a closure of a day or two.

The other airports in Sicily and southern Calabria grew sharply in the same months. Palermo handled 1,334,996 passengers in August, up 32.3%, and 1,227,047 in September, up 29.9%. Trapani grew 52.2% in August and 31.9% in September. Comiso nearly quadrupled in August and grew more than fourfold in September, from very small bases. Reggio Calabria grew 6.0% and 7.9%. Lamezia Terme in Calabria grew 24.8% and 23.6%. In both August and September, Palermo handled more passengers than Catania, by about 333,584 in August and about 182,923 in September (ours). In June, before the closures, Catania was ahead by about 250,000 (ours).

These airports were already growing before Etna erupted. Palermo was up about 9.1% in January to July, Trapani about 28.7% and Comiso about 271% (ours, from the Assaeroporti cumulative figures). Comiso's case is the clearest. It lost 48.4% of its passengers in 2025, falling to 134,495. Of its gain of about 241,150 passengers over January to September, about 51,892 came in August (ours). Most of Comiso's rebound happened outside the closures.

A rough comparison is possible and needs care. Take each neighboring airport's January to July growth rate as its trend. In August, Palermo, Trapani, Comiso and Reggio Calabria together handled about 271,000 more passengers than that trend implies (ours). In September the excess was about 218,000. Catania's shortfall against its own trend was about 323,000 and about 219,000. The magnitudes are similar. That is consistent with passengers moving from Catania to the other airports. It does not prove it. Lamezia Terme is left out of the sum because no source read for this report names it as a diversion airport. Adding it would raise the excess to about 309,000 in August and about 249,000 in September (ours), and the September excess would then be larger than Catania's shortfall. Seasonal patterns, new routes and airline decisions also change monthly growth, and the trend rates come from rounded percentages. Assaeroporti does not attribute any airport's growth to the closures. No airline, airport or authority has published the number of passengers who flew to Palermo or Comiso instead of Catania.

The cost of moving is also unmeasured, beyond anecdotes. Palermo is on the opposite coast of the island from Catania. The regional government said on 12 August that it had arranged six extra Trenitalia trains and extra bus runs, including up to 20 a day each way between Palermo and Catania, and stated that airlines remained responsible for passenger assistance. Il Post reported on 11 August, citing travelers' posts on social media, that taxis and private shuttles between airports cost up to €700. The consumer group Codacons reported one-day car-hire prices on 13 August well above those for the same rental on 27 August. These are snapshots, not series.

The €24 million figure is the top of a first-days estimate

The only money figure for the closures came early. On 12 August Assoesercenti Catania, an association of local businesses, gave a "prima stima", a first estimate, of between €12.8 million and €24 million in missed tourist spending. It covered the first four days of the emergency, from 8 August, according to Corriere Etneo. The president of the association, Salvo Politino, gave the figure. The article cited about 700 flights cancelled or diverted and the airport's more than 12.3 million passengers a year. It gave no spending per visitor, no passenger count and no method.

The upper bound became the headline. Sky TG24 reported on 15 August an estimated tourism damage of at least €24 million over six days, turning the top of a four-day range into a floor. The range itself is wide. The upper bound is almost twice the lower one (ours). It was published before the August closure ended and before the September closures happened. No updated estimate from Assoesercenti or any other body was found.

Other tourism bodies gave no figures. CNA Turismo Catania said the damage to businesses was enormous and that cancellations already reached beyond the Ferragosto holiday of 15 August, according to WordNews on 15 August. Hotel occupancy figures from Federalberghi or Confcommercio for Catania or Taormina in August and September 2026 were not found. The Ministry of Tourism published no estimate in the documents read, and no statement by Tourism Minister Gianmarco Mazzi on the closures was verified.

Passenger tallies have the same weakness. Early headlines in La Sicilia and Today.it, whose articles could not be read, spoke of 100,000 passengers involved. A claims company, ItaliaRimborso, was quoted by Corriere di Ragusa on 24 August as putting the number above 350,000. Neither figure has a stated method. SAC published flights, not passengers. Catania's 12.4 million passengers in 2025 average about 33,900 a day (ours), and August is busier than average. A daily throughput is not a count of people whose flights were cancelled.

The monthly passenger data give a partial check. Catania's two-month loss of about 482,467 passengers (ours) against 2025 is a count of airport passengers, where each arrival and each departure counts once. It is not a count of visitors, and some of those passengers still reached eastern Sicily through Palermo or Comiso. It also includes September, when the airport was closed for parts of at least five days, with a brief suspension on a sixth. Applying any spending per passenger to that number would produce an estimate, not a measurement.

The closures also reopened an old argument about the airport itself. Nello Musumeci, the minister for civil protection, said that "it is not the volcano that is in the wrong place, but the airport," and that the issue deserved long-term reflection in infrastructure planning, Reuters reported on 14 August. The regional government responded on 12 August with extra trains, buses and volunteers. Neither statement came with an estimate of what the closures had cost or what an alternative would cost. SAC's sale of a stake of at least 51%, launched in May according to Reuters, was under way while the airport was closed.

Passengers are owed care after an ash closure, and usually no compensation

This section is general information, not legal advice. EU Regulation 261/2004 sets passenger rights for flights from EU airports and on EU airlines to them. Article 5(3) says an airline does not have to pay the fixed compensation if it can prove the cancellation was caused by extraordinary circumstances that could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken. Recital 14 gives the reasoning. Press coverage of the Catania closures, including Al Jazeera on 14 August and Corriere di Ragusa on 24 August, treated volcanic ash as such a circumstance.

The other duties remain. On a cancellation, Article 8 gives passengers the choice of a refund within seven days or re-routing to their final destination. Article 9 requires meals and refreshments in reasonable relation to the wait, hotel accommodation where needed, and transport to it. In McDonagh v Ryanair, decided on 31 January 2013 after the 2010 Icelandic ash crisis, the Court of Justice of the EU held that these care obligations continue in extraordinary circumstances and carry no time or money limit, according to a summary by the Public Interest Law Alliance. The judgment text itself was not read for this report.

A diverted flight raises further questions, such as who pays for transport from Palermo to Catania. Those depend on the facts of each case. Passengers should keep receipts and contact their airline or the national enforcement body, ENAC in Italy.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers flying to eastern Sicily should treat an Etna closure as a known risk with no published frequency. In 2026 the airport closed in early July, from 12 to 15 August after days of restrictions, on 14 to 15 September and from 26 to 28 September, with a short suspension on 29 September, on press reports of operator notices. Each closure was announced with a deadline that was often extended, and flights were diverted to Palermo, Comiso and Trapani. Check SAC's notices and your airline before leaving for the airport. A refund or re-routing and care during the wait are owed under EU Regulation 261/2004, but fixed compensation usually is not when ash is the cause. Our Sicily travel guide covers other ways into the island.

Tourism businesses and investors have one week of official flight data and monthly passenger totals to work with. SAC's note covers 6 to 12 August: 1,974 flights scheduled, about 36% cancelled, about 630 diverted. Assaeroporti shows Catania down 22.6% in August and 15.4% in September, and down 3.3% over nine months after growing about 2.4% to July (ours). The €12.8–24 million estimate covers four days and has no published method. SAC launched the sale of a stake of at least 51% in May, Reuters reported, and the airport's August and September falls coincide with the closures in its own traffic data. No public source prices the risk.

Journalists and analysts should name the window and the measure every time, and treat Palermo's 32.3% August growth as an airport total that includes diverted and organic traffic in unknown proportions. For the wider picture, see our 2026 tourism record watch, our analysis of ITA Airways and Lufthansa and our reports on EES at Italy's borders and Italy versus Spain on tourism nights, where totals are published and measured effects are not.