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Air Controller Strike in France Causes Cancellations Air Controller Strike in France Causes Cancellations
(about 13 hours later)
PARIS — The crowds in the airport terminals serving the French capital were visibly thinner than usual for a weekday morning, airport officials said Tuesday, as air traffic controllers here began a three-day strike to protest European Union plans to accelerate the integration of the region’s fragmented air space. PARIS — The scene at Charles de Gaulle Airport on Tuesday underscored an all-too-familiar trope about France.
As of 10 a.m., approximately 40 percent of flights had been canceled at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Roissy, north of Paris, said a spokeswoman for the airport operator, Aéroports de Paris. With air traffic controllers on strike, tourists from around the world arrived in Paris to find themselves stranded, many unable to make connecting flights to other parts of the Continent. The three-day strike, which began Tuesday, sought to protest a proposal to accelerate the integration of air traffic management systems across the Continent. But for some it mainly served to highlight France’s stubborn singularity, which has made the country increasingly uncompetitive in European and global marketplaces.
“For the moment, the situation is calm, but there are likely to be more delays as the day progresses,” said the spokeswoman, who asked not to be named in accordance with airport policy. “Most passengers appear to have been given sufficient warning in advance and have not come to the airport.” “These strikes always happen, especially during the months of June and July,” said Britt-Marie Stromer, a 70-year-old Swedish retiree. “It doesn’t work like this in other European countries.”
A majority of intercontinental flights departing from Charles de Gaulle appeared to be operating, she said, with cancellations and delays mainly affecting short-haul flights within Europe. At Orly Airport, which lies to the south of Paris and serves mainly French and European destinations, roughly half of all flights have been canceled. Some 1,800 flights — roughly half of all scheduled flights — were canceled across the country Tuesday, while hundreds more were delayed and disrupted by the spillover in Europe. French aviation officials said they expected as many as 50 percent of flights to be canceled again Wednesday until at least midday Thursday. The controllers are protesting Brussels’s plans to accelerate the integration of the European Union’s fragmented air space, meant to improve transportation efficiency and lower the cost of air travel.
France’s largest regional airports, Lyon, Nice, Marseille Toulouse and Bordeaux, reported flight cancellation rates of 30 percent to 40 percent. The terminals at Paris area airports were largely calm, because most airlines had managed to warn passengers well in advance. But many travelers still had not gotten the word.
Other flights that normally pass over French airspace were also expected to face some delays because of rerouting. But many passengers said they could not comprehend why France, one of Europe’s biggest tourist destinations, appeared so resistant to changes that economists say have the potential to bolster travel and, with it, economic growth.
The strike, which was expected to cause the cancellation of up to 50 percent of flights to and from French airports through Thursday, is timed to coincide with the formal announcement Tuesday by the European Union’s transportation commissioner, Siim Kallas, of changes to European legislation aimed at speeding the transfer of certain air traffic management functions and decision-making power to a central body in Brussels and away from the European Union’s 27 member states. “I’m on vacation, which is supposed to be a relaxing time,” said Brittany Beaton, a 28-year-old social worker from Canada who had planned to fly to Barcelona. An alternative flight Air France offered her was too expensive, she said, “so I’m going to try to take a train.”
The main air traffic controllers’ union in France announced plans to strike late last week to protest what it called the Union’s “unprecedented cost-cutting plan,” which it warned would sap need resources at a time when it says France should be investing to upgrade its air traffic management systems. French airports, airlines and traffic controllers tend to have the reputation of being more strike-prone than their European peers. In reality, analysts say, a number of similarly disruptive labor actions have been undertaken in recent years by workers in Germany, Spain and Britain.
Controllers in about a half-dozen other European countries, including Hungary, Portugal and Slovakia, were expected to join in with more symbolic protests on Wednesday, union leaders said, though these actions were expected to last no more than 24 hours and were unlikely to cause serious disruptions. Nonetheless, Tuesday’s events seemed to follow mounting opposition by workers in other sectors of the French economy who continue to resist structural changes aimed at shaving labor and operating costs.
The Union has sought for more than a decade to unify a patchwork of national air traffic control systems — part of a master plan known as the Single European Sky. The aim is to streamline a system that officials say adds about 5 billion euros, or $7.3 billion, in unnecessary costs each year and contributes to millions of tons of wasted fuel and added carbon emissions. While it was hard to tell on Tuesday, the government of France’s Socialist president, François Hollande, says it actually strongly supports the idea of a unified regional airspace. But French officials do not like the way Brussels is trying to cajole its 27 member states toward that goal.
But Brussels has grown impatient with the slow pace of member states’ implementation of legislation that was voted in 2009. A deadline to merge the bloc’s 27 national airspaces into nine ‘'functional airspace blocs'’ by the end of 2012 has not been met. Since the fall, Siim Kallas, the European transport commissioner, has been trying to turn up the heat on member states like France that are seen to be dragging their feet. It was a decade ago that European officials proposed legislation to replace a crazy quilt of air traffic control fiefs that officials say account for about $6.5 billion in unnecessary costs each year. The measure was passed by the European Parliament in 2009 and subsequently endorsed by France and all other member states.
Mr. Kallas, the transport commissioner, is proposing changes that would confer more power to Eurocontrol, an agency in Brussels that is already responsible for coordinating the flow of air traffic across the Union and an additional 12 nearby countries. Last year, Mr. Kallas threatened legal action and fines against member states for not meeting key milestones of the legislation. On Tuesday, he proposed ways to to inject fresh momentum into the process by granting significant new decision-making powers to Eurocontrol, an agency in Brussels that is already responsible for coordinating air traffic flows across the Union and an additional 12 nearby countries.
They also include a proposal to break up state-owned monopolies that are responsible for services like air navigation, meteorology and surveillance, which Brussels claims are among the biggest cost drivers in managing European air traffic. His proposals include a measure to separate national regulation of air travel from traffic management services, as well as a mandate that state-owned monopoly providers of navigation, weather forecasting, surveillance and other services be privatized. But Mr. Kallas’s proposals require approval from the European Parliament and member states.
It is these proposals that have angered Paris. In an interview Tuesday, France’s transport minister, Frédéric Cuvillier, said the initiative amounted to “regulatory harassment.” He accused Brussels of trying to rush through one-size-fits-all changes that did not take into account differences in the way member states have historically managed their own airspace.
“It is necessary that these things happen in a spirit of respect for differences in national organization,” Mr. Cuvillier said. “We have to give it time.”
And just to show France was not alone, Mr. Cuvillier said he had persuaded his German counterpart, Peter Ramsauer, to sign a joint letter to Mr. Kallas, asking him to delay presenting his new proposals to the European Parliament.
But Mr. Kallas said France, Germany and others have already had plenty of time.
“Our airlines and their passengers have had to endure more than 10 years of reduced services and missed deadlines,” he said Tuesday in Strasbourg. “We need to boost the competitiveness of the European aviation sector and create more jobs in the airlines and at airports.”
For passengers like Alexander Eliassem, a 38-year-old Norwegian, patience with France’s philosophy was wearing thin on Tuesday. He and his exhausted family were off to search for a place to stay for the night after their Lufthansa flight to Oslo was canceled.
“I have a 9-year-old child with me so, yes, it’s a little difficult,” Mr. Eliassem said. He said the airline would partly reimburse him, but only if he stayed in a hotel of no more than three stars in the notoriously generous rating system. “This is France, so that isn’t saying much.”

Catherine Chapman contributed reporting.