Sixteen flights to Dublin Airport and 15 flights departing the airport, which were scheduled for today and tomorrow, have been cancelled because of an air traffic controller strike in France, according to the live air traffic website, Flight Radar 24.
A spokesperson for the DAA, the operator of Dublin and Cork airports, said: “We advise all passengers to stay in contact with their airline if their flight is due to fly through French air traffic control space in the coming days.”
Ryanair called on the president of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen to take “urgent action” to protect flights affected by air traffic control strikes in France.
Speaking in a video posted on Twitter, chief executive of Ryanair Michael O’Leary said the airline had to cancel 400 flights on Tuesday.
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“All of these have been cancelled because of the French ATC strikes. The majority of these flights are overflights and are not going to France,” he said.
“It is absolutely indefensible that flights going from Ireland to Italy, Poland to Portugal, or from Spain to Germany, are being cancelled simply because the French want to prioritise their domestic flights and cancel all the overflights.”
In the first five months of the year, there were 58 days of ATC strikes, 11 times more than there were in 2022.
“These repeated ATC strikes have unfairly forced airlines to disproportionately cancel thousands of EU overflights from Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK and Ireland,” Ryanair said in a statement.
“France (and all other EU states) should use Minimum Service Laws to protect overflights during ATC strikes as they do in Greece, Italy and Spain,” it said.
Ryanair called on the EU commission to “respect the strike rights of ATC unions, but protect 100 per cent of overflights (like Greece, Italy and Spain) during national ATC strikes”.
“It is utterly unacceptable that Ursula von der Leyen is ignoring these more than 1.1 million passengers, who are sick and tired of having their overflights cancelled at short notice due to repeated ATC strikes,” a spokesperson for Ryanair said.
A spokesperson for Aer Lingus said the airline was operating its schedule as planned on Tuesday. “However we continue to closely monitor air traffic control strike action in the French region,” it said.
“We will notify customers directly of any changes to their flights. For added reassurance customers can also check the status of their flight on aerlingus.com or via the App.”