Ns News Online Desk: 29,500 flights were expected in the European network
Eurocontrol – which covers 41 countries including all 28 EU nations plus others in Europe including Ukraine, Turkey and Norway
BERLIN: Travelers across Europe suffered disruption on Tuesday after the failure of a continent-wide flight plan processing system, affecting around half of the day’s flights and adding to problems in France caused by labor stoppages.
The breakdown of the ETFMS system at European network manager Eurocontrol came on a day when travelers in France were hit by strikes by rail workers and Air France employees.
The outage meant flight plans filed by airlines before 1026 GMT were lost, leading to restrictions on the number of departures at airports across Europe.
“Today 29,500 flights were expected in the European network. Approximately half of those could have some delay as a result of the system outage,” Eurocontrol said.
It said the issue had been identified but it would take until late on Tuesday evening for normal operations to resume.
