BRUSSELS — French air traffic controllers are planning to walk off the job on Thursday and Friday, signaling a summer travel season that threatens to be plagued with delays.
The core reason is the continent’s fragmented, overstretched and understaffed air traffic control system.
While air traffic controllers plead overwork and burnout, airlines like Ryanair are demanding that politicians act to keep planes flying.
The French strike “will eventually have a negative impact on the network, that’s for sure,” said Frédéric Deleau, vice president for Europe of the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations, a global organization whose membership does not include French unions.
When strikes or other air traffic problems occur, he said, “the rippling effect of traffic jam” forces air traffic controllers to “hold traffic near the airport and then en route we have to start reducing the speed of the aircraft so that they don’t arrive too early … only after the problem is solved we can let the system resume.”
The looming French strike is just one more risk in a gloomy outlook for summer flights.
“Every summer since Covid has been the worst summer until now,” said Paul Reuter, vice president of the pilot union European Cockpit Association.
“We have a finite airspace, a finite number of runways, the airports have capacity constraints … any disruption, because have very little buffers, it’s going to mess up the whole system. And that is probably what we’re going to see this summer as well,” said Reuter, who works as a Boeing 737 captain for Luxembourg’s Luxair.
Politicians are also well aware that air traffic in Europe has become fragile and prone to disruption.
“Already last year, the delays in the European aviation network were the worst in 25 years, and the situation this year is likely to deteriorate further,” Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas wrote in a letter to transport ministers in April, seen by POLITICO.
“Last year, Europe saw 35,000 flights on a busy summer day, this year we expect to reach 38,000,” Tzitzikostas added.
“High demand puts considerable pressure on Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), some of whom continue to struggle with staff and capacity shortages,” the commissioner acknowledged, calling on governments to start “hiring and training additional controllers where needed.”
Calling for more controllers
But the problem cannot be solved quickly because training new air traffic controllers takes at least three years. On top of that, professional certification to manage air traffic is limited to a specific area of Europe’s fragmented airspace, which is managed by 40 different ANSPs.
CAE, a Canadian company that specializes in training services, recently forecast that Europe will need the most air traffic controllers of any region over the next decade — 27,000 out of 71,000 globally.
Meanwhile, airlines are going ballistic.
In an effort to name and shame the worst ANSPs, Ryanair launched a “League of Delays,” which ranks the countries causing the most extra travel time in the European network.
“France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and the U.K. continue to be the worst air traffic control (ATC) providers for delays as a result of their national Transport Ministers’ failure to ensure their ATC services are properly staffed and managed,” the budget airline said Wednesday.
According to the data gathered by the low-cost carrier, French ATC caused delays for over 26,000 Ryanair flights from Jan. 1 to June 30, affecting a total of 4.7 million passengers. Spain followed with around 16,500 delayed flights, and Germany with 7,500.
“Another month of ATC mismanagement and staff shortages has passed, but neither the EU Commission nor national Transport Ministers … have taken any action to fix Europe’s worst-performing ATC providers,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said in a statement.
The outspoken airline boss also accused ANSPs of being “protected State monopolies [which] don’t care about passengers and don’t care about flight delays.”
In response to Ryanair’s repeated accusations against French air traffic control, the French Ministry of Transport told POLITICO in June that “air traffic control is only the third most common cause of flight delays in Europe, after issues attributable to airlines.”
It also pointed the finger at Ryanair.
“Notably, Ryanair ranks 26th among the most punctual European airlines, with a punctuality rate of just 69 percent. By comparison, the most punctual airline in Europe shows 86 percent punctuality,” the ministry said in a written reply.
Moreover, “if French or German air traffic control services generate delays, this is also because they operate in one of the world’s most densely populated airspaces, which has been subject to significant constraints in recent years due to geopolitical considerations and defence requirements,” the ministry added.
According to Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management body, “it is too soon to say” if 2025 will be worse than last year, when it calculated air traffic flow management delays reached their highest level in decades, averaging 2.13 minutes per flight.
“Air traffic in Europe is at pre-pandemic levels and the European air traffic network is saturated,” Eurocontrol said in a emailed reply.
The unstable geopolitical context also complicates traffic management.
“Complexity was already high before the escalation of the Middle East crisis, in part as a result of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Some ANSPs in the South-West, South-East and Central Europe face 30-40 percent more flights than in 2019,” Eurocontrol said.
It’s all making for tough times for airlines, passengers and air traffic controllers.
According to Deleau, higher travel demand means “fatigue is equally eating pilots and controllers.” This creates concern as “our core business is safety,” he said.
When controllers “are critically and chronically fatigued because of the hours they have to work in April, May and June, then they are already at red alert for the fatigue levels, and they still have to go full blast for July, August, September and October before they can foresee that the traffic will go down,” said Deleau, who has been an active air traffic controller for the last 33 years.
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