Plenty more travel misery to come, Eurocontrol agency warns.

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Some 17,000 flights in European airspace are likely to be cancelled Friday due to the dangers posed by a volcanic ash cloud spreading from Iceland, the intergovernmental Eurocontrol agency said.

The intergovernmental air traffic coordinating agency, based in Brussels, warned that there was plenty more travel misery to come for travellers in Europe and beyond.

"Forecasts suggest that the cloud of volcanic ash is continuing to move east and southeast and that the impact will continue for at least the next 24 hours," it said in the statement.

Volcanoes are a much-feared peril in civil aviation, disgorging fine ash that can damage jet engines, choke the hi-tech probes used in modern avionics and scour a cockpit windscreen to the point of invisibility.

Eurocontrol "expects around 11,000 flights to take place today in European airspace. On a normal day, we would expect 28,000."

Of the 300 transatlantic flights that would usually arrive in Europe in the morning, only 100-120 managed to complete their journey, said Eurocontrol, which coordinates air navigation services across Europe.

Eurocontrol, which covers 38 nations, said airspace had been shut down completely in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

On top of that there were no flights in and out of any of the Paris airports, parts of Germany including Duesseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin and the airspace around Frankfurt, as well as parts of Poland including Warsaw.

There were reports elsewhere of a halt of air traffic in and out of Austria, Denmark and the Baltic region as a whole.

Experts warned the fallout from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, which began to cover the skies of northern Europe on Thursday, could take several days to clear.