French air traffic controllers call off strike

French air traffic controllers ended their strike on Wednesday after causing cancellations and delays on Tuesday and Wednesday. They said they were still unhappy with the amount airlines are to pay towards air traffic control.

A control tower at Nice airport Open access/Airborne06

Only one union had issued the strike call, the Unsa-ICNA which is the third largest in the profession in terms of support, and, according to the aviation authority, only 9.46 per cent of staff had joined the industrial action.

But as many as 600 people were stranded at Paris’s Orly airport on Wednesday morning and flights were cancelled in and out of Paris and in Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille-Marignane, Montpellier and Nice.

The national carrier, Air France, reported delays of up to 50 minutes.

The union had initially threatened to continue the strike until next Sunday but, after a meeting at the transport ministry, called it off on Wednesday afternoon.

“The seriousness and urgency of the situation had been expressed,” it said a join statement with an engineers’ union, while saying that the toll paid by airlines for air traffic control is still not high enough, despite a hike won by negotiations with another union, SNCTA.