Ryanair, Europe’s favourite airline, today (22nd Nov) once again called for the EU Commission to remove the ‘right to strike’ from essential services such as Europe’s air traffic control after it was forced to cancel over 60 flights ahead of a 24 hour strike by Portuguese ATC (NAV) which will close all Portuguese airspace on Wednesday (24th).

So far in 2010, Ryanair has been forced to cancel over 2,000 flights and delay over 12,000 other flights, disrupting over 2.5m passengers, as a direct result of Belgian, French, Spanish and now Portuguese ATC strikes and work to rules.  This air strike crisis is being ignored at EU level and comes just months after 1.5m Ryanair passengers were disrupted during the ash ‘crisis’ when Govts needlessly closed European airspace.

Ryanair called on the EU Commission to reform ATC services as follows:

1. Remove the “right to strike” for essential services such as ATC’s.
2. Sack any ATC staff who participate in illegal strikes (as Ronald Reagan sacked and replaced striking ATC staff in the US in the 1980’s).
3. Deregulate Europe’s national ATC services to allow non striking ATC’s to keep the skies over Belgium, France, Portugal and Spain open, while their overpaid, underworked ATC’s go on strike again and again.
4. Reform the EU261 passenger rights legislation to relieve airlines of ‘right to care’ obligations in such force majeure cases which are clearly outside of airlines’ control.

Ryanair’s Stephen McNamara said:

“European Governments bungled and failed to keep European skies open in April and May after a volcano thousands of miles from Europe erupted and now they are once again failing to keep Europe’s skies open as passengers and airlines face yet more travel disruption due to strikes – this time at Portuguese air traffic control.

We once again call on the EU to remove the ‘right to strike’ for ATC as it is for other essential services like the police and fire services.  Striking ATC controllers don’t care about consumers, they don’t care about passengers and they repeatedly strike because they know they can shut down Europe’s skies and hold EU Governments and passengers to ransom.

The EU Commission must act now to end this ATC chaos.”