European airlines go ballistic over French air traffic controller strike

BRUSSELS — A two-day strike by French air traffic controllers disrupted more than a thousand flights, and airlines are hopping mad over the millions of euros they’ve lost.

“I’d be better if I wasn’t canceling 400 flights and 70,000 passengers just because a bunch of French air traffic controllers want to have recreational strikes,” Ryanair’s chief executive officer Michael O’Leary told POLITICO.

The walkout “is extremely expensive for us. It costs us millions of euros,” said Benjamin Smith, the CEO of Air France-KLM Group, during a press call.

The strike, which took place on Thursday and Friday, was over disputes between two unions and the French directorate general for civil aviation regarding understaffing and the introduction of a new biometric time clock system to monitor air traffic controllers’ work attendance.

Airlines are increasingly angry over the frequent French strikes that regularly upend their schedules.

“There’s no shortage of air traffic controllers in France. The real issue is that they don’t roster them particularly well,” O’Leary said, adding that the French controllers “are just badly managed.”

The strike “is a horrible image for France, for customers at the beginning of the summer vacation season coming into this wonderful country, to be faced with either delayed or canceled flights,” Smith added. “It’s not something that you see in the rest of Europe.”

Unions have long complained about structural understaffing of air traffic controllers.

Staffing shortages played a role in a near-collision between an easyJet plane and a private jet at the Bordeaux airport in December 2022, according to French investigators. They found that three controllers were working in the tower at the time of the incident instead of the six required by the duty roster.

This week’s walkout was called by France’s second-largest air traffic controllers’ union, UNSA-ICNA; it was joined by the USAC-CGT, the third-largest union. According to AFP, some 270 controllers out of 1,400 participated in the strike on Thursday.

The airlines also accused France of failing to protect planes flying over the country during these actions, which cause disruption throughout Europe.

“It is indefensible that today that I’m canceling flights from Ireland to Italy, from Germany to Spain, from Portugal to Poland,” O’Leary said. 

The budget airline chief blamed the European Union, and specifically European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for the situation.

O’Leary said that of Ryanair’s 400 cancellations caused by the strike, “360, or 90 percent of those flights, would operate if the Commission protected the overflights as Spain, Italy and Greece do during air traffic control strikes.”

“Von der Leyen and the Commission made a big song and dance during Brexit about: ‘We must protect the single market, the single market is sacrosanct, nothing would be allowed to disrupt the single market,’” he said. “Unless you’re a French air traffic controller and you can shut down the sky over France.”

“Ursula von der Leyen, being the useless politician that she is, would rather sit in her office in Brussels, pontificating about Palestine or U.S. trade agreements or anything else. Anything but take any effective action to protect the flights of holidaymakers,” O’Leary said after calling for von der Leyen to quit unless she can reform European air traffic control.

Von der Leyen is under fire for various actions and even faces a confidence vote in European Parliament next week.

The European Commission did not respond to Ryanair’s statement, but transport spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen insisted that air traffic control issues are “on the Commission’s radar.”

But “air traffic controlling, per international and EU legislation, it’s the responsibility of member states and countries generally,” she added during a press briefing.

“We fully acknowledge the legitimate right of strikes in member states, but it is an issue that is to be addressed more broadly,” Itkonen said, responding to a question on airlines’ requests to overfly countries during strikes.