On this page
Air traffic control strikes have disrupted European flights repeatedly through 2026, and the biggest of them, a French national walkout over the Ascension holiday in mid-May, grounded flights right across the continent. The pattern is familiar by now: most summers bring at least one, France is usually at the centre, and a strike there can cancel a flight between two countries that neither touches French soil. The dispute driving the French action is unresolved as the summer runs on, so more disruption is possible.
What’s happened this year, and where
The largest single event was a national strike by French controllers over the Ascension Day long weekend, 14 to 16 May. France’s civil aviation authority, the DGAC, ordered airlines to cut their schedules in advance to match the reduced staffing, up to around three-quarters of flights at Paris Orly and roughly half at many other French airports. Because those cuts fall on flights crossing French airspace as well as flights using French airports, UK and Irish services to Spain, Italy and Greece were cancelled or delayed on the strike days too.
France hasn’t been alone. In Spain, controllers employed by SAERCO, a private company that staffs several regional towers, began an open-ended strike from 17 April that mainly hit five Canary Islands airports: Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, La Palma, El Hierro and La Gomera. Air traffic control counts as an essential public service in Spanish law, so the transport ministry set minimum-service levels that kept emergency, medical and inter-island lifeline flights running and guaranteed a share of the rest. In Belgium, controllers at the national provider Skeyes staged unannounced walkouts on 2 June that halted air traffic to and from the country for an afternoon, cancelling around 140 flights at Brussels Airport. Italy had its own strike day on 5 July, when a 24-hour air traffic stoppage at Milan Malpensa coincided with airport-security and ground-handling action elsewhere, though Italian law protects flights within set time windows on strike days.
The French dispute is the one to watch, because it’s still live. More recently, the French Court of Auditors, the state’s public spending watchdog, published a report criticising the controllers’ strike record and productivity and recommended guaranteeing around 65% of scheduled flights during any strike, well above the current rules. The main controllers’ union rejected the report outright. Nothing has been settled, which is why further action over the rest of the summer can’t be ruled out.
Why French strikes keep coming back
France is at the centre of this for a reason of geography rather than any special appetite for striking. It sits between the UK, Ireland and northern Europe on one side and Spain, Italy, Greece and North Africa on the other, so somewhere between a fifth and a third of all flights crossing French airspace on a given day are overflights, planes passing over without landing in France at all. When French controllers walk out, all of that traffic is affected.
The reason a French strike causes more disruption than a Spanish or Italian one is a quirk of the law. Both Spain and Italy protect a guaranteed minimum of flights during a strike, and neither cuts overflights on the same terms as their own domestic traffic. France’s minimum-service rules give overflights no special protection, so a flight from the UK to Greece that only clips the edge of French airspace is cut on the same basis as a flight into Paris.
Under the surface is a long-running pay and working-conditions dispute between French controllers and the state, which grew out of the wider public-sector unrest around France’s 2023 pension reform. The unions want salaries to catch up with several years of inflation, and they’re resisting a reorganisation of the country’s air navigation service and, more recently, new digital clocking-in systems. A rule introduced in 2023 requires each controller to declare in advance whether they’ll strike, at least 48 hours ahead, which is what lets the DGAC work out how many flights can run and order the cuts a day or two before, rather than leaving passengers to find out at the airport.
There’s a bigger structural backdrop too. Since 2004 the EU has been trying to knit Europe’s national airspaces into a single system, the Single European Sky, organised around where planes actually fly rather than national borders. More than twenty years on it has made little real progress, partly because countries treat control of their own airspace as a matter of sovereignty and partly because overflight fees are worth real money to them. The result is that there’s no shared spare capacity to soak up a strike in one country, so a French walkout still disrupts the whole network. Airlines have pushed hard for the reform, Ryanair loudest among them, and its public petition, which it says has gathered more than two million signatures, wants the Commission to protect overflights during national strikes. Ryanair says French strikes since 2023 have run to more than 99 days and disrupted over a million passengers. That’s the airline’s own figure and it’s an interested party in the row, but it gives a sense of the scale it’s complaining about.
How a strike in France cancels a flight to Greece
This is the part that catches people out. A flight from, say, Manchester to Athens doesn’t travel in a straight line handled by one country. It passes through a sequence of national airspace sectors, each run by that country’s own controllers, and a typical route from the UK to southern Europe crosses French airspace on the way. When French controllers strike and the DGAC cuts the number of flights allowed through, that plane is in the queue for the cuts even though neither end of its trip is in France.
A flight could in theory detour around France, but rerouting adds a lot of extra fuel, time and cost, and the neighbouring airspaces over Spain or Switzerland only have so much room, so for a short-haul holiday flight it’s usually simpler for the airline to cancel or delay it. Because controllers have to declare a strike 48 hours ahead, airlines generally know which flights they’re losing a day or two out and email the affected passengers, rather than the cancellation landing on the day.
What you’re owed if your flight is cancelled
Air passenger rights here come from EU Regulation 261, which the UK kept in its own law after Brexit and which still covers flights leaving the UK or the EU, and flights into the UK or EU on a UK or EU airline. It gives you three separate things when a flight is cancelled, and these apply no matter what caused it, strike or not.
The first is a choice between a full refund and an alternative flight. You can take your money back for the part of the ticket you didn’t use, or the airline has to re-route you to where you were going at the earliest opportunity, or on a later date that suits you. That choice is yours, not the airline’s. With young children, taking the next available flight, even one the airline books you onto with a different carrier, is often more use than a refund, because it keeps the rest of your protections attached to the booking.
The second is care while you wait, provided free by the airline. That means meals and drinks in proportion to the delay, a couple of phone calls or emails, and if you’re kept overnight, a hotel and the transfers to and from it. If the airline doesn’t arrange this at a busy airport, you’re entitled to sort out something reasonable yourself and claim it back, so keep the receipts. Reasonable means a modest hotel and a meal, not a luxury one, and drinks at the bar are unlikely to be covered.
The third is priority for the passengers who need it most. People with reduced mobility and anyone travelling with them, and children flying alone, must be looked after first for both re-routing and care.
Why a strike usually means no cash compensation
There’s a fourth right people often assume they’ll get, and it’s the one that usually doesn’t apply to a strike like this. On top of the refund and care, Regulation 261 pays fixed cash compensation, from £220 to £520 depending on the distance, when a flight is cancelled or badly delayed by something the airline could have controlled. An air traffic control strike isn’t one of those things. The airline doesn’t employ the controllers and can’t settle their dispute, so in law it counts as an extraordinary circumstance, and no fixed compensation is due. The refund, the re-routing and the care all still stand. This is a common misunderstanding. A cancelled flight doesn’t automatically mean a payout, and whether you’re owed one depends on whose fault the cancellation was.
That distinction matters, because an airline’s own staff going on strike is treated the opposite way. A 2018 ruling by the EU’s Court of Justice found that a strike by an airline’s own workers, its pilots, cabin crew or check-in staff, is within the airline’s control and is not an extraordinary circumstance. So if your flight is cancelled by a cabin-crew walkout rather than an air traffic control strike, you can be owed the fixed compensation as well as the refund and care, as long as the airline didn’t warn you at least two weeks ahead. On a day when several strikes overlap, which particular one grounded your flight can therefore change what you’re owed.
Flying with young children when a strike is likely
None of this is a reason to cancel a summer trip, and a cancelled flight is a known process with clear rights rather than a situation with no help. A few practical things make it easier if you’re flying on a day when a strike is in the air.
Book the earliest flight you can when you have the choice. Delays build through the day, because a plane that runs late in the morning stays late for the rest of its flights, so the first departure has the best chance of getting away on time. If it is cancelled, you’ve also got the whole day left to be rebooked rather than being stranded overnight.
Keep the essentials in your hand luggage, not the hold, on any day with a live strike warning: enough nappies, formula or baby food for a long wait, any regular medication, a change of clothes for a young child and your chargers. If the flight is cancelled and moved to the next day, your hold bag may travel separately or stay out of reach until then.
Watch the airline’s app and turn on its push alerts, which tend to reach you faster than email. Because the cuts are usually known a day or two ahead, airlines often contact affected passengers directly, and some let you switch to an earlier or later flight for free before your own is even cancelled. Knowing your rebooking options before you reach the airport saves a lot of standing in a queue with tired children.
It’s worth checking your travel insurance before you go in a summer like this one. Some policies cover extra costs from strike disruption that the airline’s care duty doesn’t, such as a pre-paid hotel night you lose at the other end, but usually only if the strike wasn’t already public knowledge when you bought the policy or booked the trip. A policy taken out early, before any particular strike is called, gives you the best chance of that cover applying.
If your flight is cancelled
- Choose between a refund and re-routing. With children, the next available flight is often more useful than your money back, because it keeps your other rights attached.
- Ask the airline for meals and, if you’re kept overnight, a hotel and transfers. If nobody sorts it, pay for something modest yourself and keep the receipts to claim back.
- Don’t count on cash compensation for an air traffic control strike. It usually doesn’t apply, though it can if the cancellation was down to the airline’s own staff.
- Rebook through the airline’s app or a quick phone call rather than joining the desk queue, and ask whether they’ll put you on another airline.
- Keep your booking reference, passports and the essentials to hand so you can move fast when a new flight comes up.
These cuts are almost always announced in advance, so a cancelled flight is rarely a same-day surprise if you’ve checked the airline’s own app or website the day before and the morning you travel. That is the single most useful habit through a strike-prone summer.
We do our best to get this right. If something here looks wrong, tell us and we'll check it.