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A two-day strike by air traffic controllers in France began on Thursday, disrupting flights across Europe and causing widespread delays for passengers as summer holiday season begins across the continent.
French air traffic controllers called for increased staffing and better conditions from France’s civil aviation general directorate (DGAC), the body in charge of airport security and airspace.
To respond to the disruption, the DGAC has asked airline companies to cancel a quarter of flights at Paris airports on Thursday and 40 per cent on Friday. There will also be widespread disruption at airports in the south of France, including cancellations at Nice, Lyon, Marseille and Montpellier.
The measures will affect flights passing through French airspace, airlines said, and come at the beginning of holiday season for many European countries.
Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, said on Thursday that it had cancelled 170 flights, affecting more than 30,000 passengers.
The company called for the European Commission to intervene to prevent future disruption, by reforming air-traffic control legislation. It said the EU should ensure full staffing for the first wave of daily departures and protect flights passing through French airspace during national ATC strikes.
The airline’s chief executive Michael O’Leary said the cancellations and delays of flights over French airspace en route to their destination due to the strike were “not acceptable”.
EasyJet said it was “extremely unhappy” with the strike action, pointing to data from aviation body Eurocontrol that France already accounted for the most number of delays of any country in Europe.
One of the two unions leading the strikes, the USAC-CGT, said that the DGAC must “change course” blaming “chronic understaffing, an unbalanced, corporatist social agreement, authoritarian management, widespread policing, threats of further outsourcing, and a deterioration of public service” for the strikes.
France’s transport minister Philippe Tabarot described the union’s demands as “unacceptable”, saying that the government would not yield to them. He pointed to salary revisions in 2024, adding that the losses for partly state-owned AirFrance could reach millions of euros.
