Germany is facing a paralyzed air traffic situation. Several airports, including Frankfurt, the largest international airport in Europe, have announced that they will remain closed to passenger traffic this Friday. Frankfurt already suffered serious disturbances this Wednesday due to a computer failure that affected the Lufthansa group. In the first moment it was feared that the reason was a cyberattackbut a few hours after the internet cut, the local authorities confirmed that it was a spectacular failure related to a big botch.
During construction work on a railway run by the national railway company Deutsche Bahn, the fiber optic cables of the telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom, buried five meters deep, had accidentally been cut. “The repair is being much more difficult because concrete was later poured over the cables and it has been necessary to remove all the work,” a company spokesman described. As a consequence, the two biggest German airports, Frankfurt and Munichthey had to cancel all takeoffs and landings, due to the impossibility of operating the billing and boarding systems.
To the delays accumulated by this incident, new problems are added this Thursday, such as the planned strike by the ground staff of the Frankfurt airport, which will not allow flights to operate. The operating company has described the consequences of the strike as “disproportionate”: it calculates the cancellation of 1,005 flights, between takeoffs and landings until Saturday, and that approximately 137,000 passengers will be affected.
In the case of Munich, a spokesman for the company that operates the airport has confirmed in statements to various German media that between 12:00 a.m. on Friday and 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, local time, none of the 700 expected takeoffs or landings of commercial flights. Munich has the added challenge of managing the arrival and departure flights of government representatives from around the world, who attend the Security Conference (MSC)in which the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the US vice president will participate, among others Kamala Harris.
Munich Airport has reported that the flights of the delegations arriving at the Security Conference will be exempt from the suspension of regular passenger operations and the Security Conference is working to ensure the arrival of all non-delegation participants. governmental. Also the airport Hamburg, in the north of the country, has joined the closure of passenger traffic and, according to some German media, the same is also expected to happen in Stuttgart. The airports of Dortmund, Hannover and Bremen, despite the fact that they will also suffer strikes, plan to remain operational with a minimum of personnel.
“Of course, the interruption in Germany will have far-reaching consequences, in many other European airports,” assumes Lufthansa spokeswoman Sandra Kraft, “because if a plane cannot land in Frankfurt, it will not be able to take off from its origin airport either, and this sometimes has consequences of various kinds.” The most affected airlines are Austrian Airline, Swiss Airlines and Brussels Airlines.
flight cancellation
The German union of the Ver.DI Services sector carries out ground personnel strikes at the country’s main airports, demanding a 10.5% wage increase for 2.5 million workers in the sector, according to the employers. The strike this Friday is added to those called in January in the aHannover and Berlin airportswhich forced the suspension of practically all flights to or from the German capital.
The ADV airport association expects much of the domestic and international air traffic to go off on Friday and warns of “massive obstructions in air traffic.” The warning strike will cause the cancellation of 2,340 flights in national and international air traffic, reports the association, which denounces that “more than 295,000 passengers become the toy of Verdi’s strike tactics” and regrets an “unprecedented escalation”.
The authorities call on passengers not to go to the airport until they have obtained information from their airline about takeoff: “Passengers who want to start their journey in Frankfurt will not be able to take their flight and transfer traffic is also affected, so it is recommended to avoid the airport as much as possible.”
