Jakarta’s Main Airport Reopened After the Anak Krakatau Ash Closure, but the Backlog Will Take Days

Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Indonesia’s main gateway, resumed flights at 08:59 a.m. local time on Monday, September 7, 2026, after roughly a day closed by volcanic ash from Anak Krakatau. Several other airports around Jakarta reopened at the same time, but the disruption is set to take days to unwind.

What reopened, and what did not

AirNav Indonesia, the country’s air navigation provider, cleared Soekarno-Hatta along with Halim Perdanakusuma in Jakarta, Husein Sastranegara in Bandung, Radin Inten II in Lampung and two smaller fields near Tangerang. A small South Sumatra airport, Atung Bungsu, had already restarted at about 9 a.m.

Indonesia’s Transportation Ministry said six airports remained shut in its Monday update, as ash kept drifting across Banten, Jakarta, West Java, Lampung and Bengkulu. Anak Krakatau stayed at the second-highest alert level after an eruptive episode that ran for about 25 hours, and officials said further eruptions were likely.

AirNav said the closures were a safety measure tied to the movement of ash through the airspace, not damage on the ground, and that it would revise its notices to airmen as conditions changed. The weekend closures had grounded flights at eight airports at their peak.

The toll keeps climbing

By Sunday evening the ministry counted about 1,558 disrupted flights and 170,000 affected passengers. By Monday, CNBC reported the cumulative total since Friday had grown to roughly 2,300 flights and more than 270,000 passengers, with over 240 further flights delayed or cancelled on Monday alone.

Al Jazeera reported that Singapore Airlines, Qantas and other carriers had dropped Jakarta services over the weekend, and that free ground transport was arranged for stranded travelers while the disaster agency prepared cloud-seeding flights to thin the ash.

Why reopening is the start of the problem, not the end

A hub does not snap back the moment its airspace clears. During the closure, aircraft that should have flown to Jakarta were held at their origin or diverted to alternates such as Semarang and Surabaya, and the crews aboard them ran down their legal duty hours in the wrong cities.

Reopening lets the airport work through its scheduled flights, but there is little spare capacity to also fly the cancelled ones. Each delayed rotation pushes into the next, the same mechanism that makes one delay cascade into the next on an ordinary bad-weather day, now with a two-day head start.

Ash adds one more step. Before a closed runway returns to service, crews inspect and sweep it, and any aircraft caught in measurable ashfall has to be checked for abrasion to engines, windshields and sensors. Airlines generally expect a disruption on this scale to take several days to fully clear.