Air traffic controllers strike: very disrupted traffic at airports – L’Express

Air traffic controllers do not ask for wage increase, but more resources. The air traffic controllers union UNSA-ICNA, which represents 20% of the vote among 4,000 employees, has called the strike on Sunday and Monday. A movement that particularly disturbs the traffic in Paris airports.

“We had to leave at 2:35 p.m.. It was written on the screens that the flight was maintained, but we learned that in fact the flight was delayed 4 hours,” gets excited transient outbound Roissy to Barcelona. “Nearly 40% of flights are delayed” at Roissy, reported an airport source, while the airport has an average of 1,400 flights a day.

If your flight is canceled, do not go to Orly

At Orly, where the movement started by the UNSA “has hardened the beginning afternoon “, only 50% of traffic was assured Sunday, according to another airport source. “There are more and more of cancellations, but it is mostly domestic flights that are impacted. The flights to overseas are maintained, but have delays of 3 to 4 hours,” said the same source .

This is beginning “to become complicated.” “A lot of people are waiting in the terminal, especially since it is a Sunday charge,” worried the same source. Air France and asks his passengers whose flights have been canceled, not to go to Orly. Five airports are also affected by this movement: Orly, Nice, Lyon, Marseille and Beauvais at a rate of almost 20% of cancellations and flight delays on both days.

An obsolete tools

The UNSA-ICNA is not protests against the salary grid, but against “the decision to accelerate the decline workforce “in 2016,” passing the departures replacement rate from 80% to 65% (which) appears totally disconnected with the operational needs of the control centers. ” “All traffic forecasts now show significant growth prospects,” the union. Thus, in nearly six years, the number of air traffic controllers in France have fallen by 10%.

Laurent Bertin, critical national secretary also in the pages of Paris of infrastructure “have over thirty years and are no longer adapted to traffic today.” “There are a growing fault we did not meet before,” he adds. It refers to the rail disaster of Brétigny-sur-Orge, which killed seven people in 2014 due to a dilapidated infrastructure and maintenance.

“At Roissy, for lack of personal, one is forced to ask the aircraft must land in Paris from between fifteen and thirty minutes late for them to be supported in due time to ‘arrival. it is not even like rail accident with Brétigny, but we take management “, warns the union.

Software from 1992

In a statement, UNSA also criticized the “considerable technological backwardness” of the tools used by air traffic controllers and the French “lack of investment,” which “lead to breakdowns increasingly frequent with direct implications in the security chain.” Air traffic controllers “require the DGAC it acquires the means to achieve these technological revolutions it can no longer defer,” says the Unsa, who wants the government to “ensure, as promised, the consideration and funding of missions DGAC “.

In 2015, air traffic had to be suddenly interrupted at Orly, reminds Le Parisien . The cause? The computer system used to manage the forecast meteorological facilities misfires. It worked on Windows 3.1, system launched by Microsoft 23 years ago and no longer accepting updates since 2001 …