The General Directorate of Civil Aviation asks companies to cancel again on Friday 30% of their flights in Paris-Orly and 20% in other airports due to the strike of air traffic controllers against the pension reform, announced this Thursday this administration.
The airports affected in the region by the suppression of one in five flights will be Marseille-Provence, Bordeaux-Mérignac and Lyon-Saint-Exupéry, and this, both on Friday and Saturday, the DGAC reported in a press release. In Orly, the situation will improve on Saturday for travelers with 15% of canceled flights, according to the same source.
Delays of less than 30 minutes at most airports
These requests by the administration seem to reflect a continuation at the same level of the mobilization of air traffic controllers against the pension reform, after the government appealed to 49.3 for its adoption. By Thursday, the DGAC had already asked the companies to give up 30% of their flight program in Orly and in three other French airports, and in Marseille and Lyon, but also Toulouse-Blagnac. Bordeaux was not affected, nor was the largest French airport, Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle. The access by car to Terminal 1 of this airport, on the other hand, was blocked on Thursday morning by protesters, according to its manager, Groupe ADP, without consequences on the departure of planes.
The interruptions seem relatively limited on Thursday morning in air transport, beyond the cancellations requested by the DGAC. At 10:30 a.m., departure and arrival delays at most French airports are less than 30 minutes, with the exception of Nantes, where arriving flights are delayed on average by almost three-quarters of an hour, and Lille-Lesquin, where the average delay is 40 minutes at departure. The Montpellier and Pau airports were briefly closed Thursday morning due to the absence of air traffic control, delaying fewer than half a dozen flights in total.
Risk of running out of kerosene
The areas managed by certain Air Route Navigation Centers (CRNA), which deal with aircraft outside the takeoff and landing phases and therefore aircraft only transiting French airspace, are also subject to delays.” moderate” “to” high “Thursday morning, stressed the pan-European air traffic surveillance agency, Eurocontrol. The most affected areas are those of Reims, Marseille and west of Paris.
Another threat looms over this sector of activity, the dry fault. The supply of kerosene to Ile-de-France and its airports by Normandy “is becoming critical”, in fact, the Ministry of Energy Transition said on Thursday. The DGAC, for its part, has spent several days encouraging companies that serve Orly and Roissy to “carry as much fuel as possible from their airport of origin.”
Source: BFM TV
