Protest snarls busy France, UK airports

Strike against EU regulators' bid to lower air-traffic charges

A strike by air traffic controllers forced cancellations of more than 60 per cent of flights around France and disrupted travel elsewhere in Europe today, as workers protested a plan to simplify Europe's patchwork airspace.

More than 2,000 flights were cancelled in France as more workers joined the second day of the strike, according to the civil aviation authority. The walkout started yesterday and is scheduled to end by tomorrow.

The umbrella union for air traffic controllers said 11 countries would take part. The biggest walkout was in France, but had a ripple effect on other European countries. Britain saw delays primarily related to the French strike. easyJet cancelled 66 flights going to France or passing through its airspace. Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest, said that roughly two-thirds of its 66 daily flights to and from France had been cancelled.

Air traffic controllers are upset at the airspace streamlining plan in part because it would hand more air traffic services to private companies.

They fear the plan will threaten passenger safety and their jobs, and claim the EU is yielding to industry pressure to cut costs.

At the heart of the dispute is the idea of a single European sky consolidating the continent's hodgepodge air traffic control systems under a sole authority, turning its many scattered air traffic zones into a few regional blocs, opening up bidding on services like weather forecasting and navigation, and easing what European officials say is a looming capacity crunch.

About 27,000 flights a day now cross European airspace, for a total of over 9 million a year and most are flying under air traffic management systems that were designed in the 1950s, the European Commission said.

Air France, in a statement today, warned passengers to delay all travel on short- or medium-distance flights until Friday or later, "because of a hardening of the labour movement".

It said it is trying to maintain its long-haul flights, and that it hopes to gradually return to normal tomorrow. At Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport, red "cancelled" notices filled information screens today and stranded passengers crowded on benches to sleep.