“You have a bunch of useless politicians wringing their hands and it all seems a bit complicated. And they’re surrounded by useless civil servants, none of whom want to do anything or get off their fat arses and reform this scandal.”

Ryanair’s chief executive Michael O’Leary isn’t known for mincing his words, and today is no exception. He is dialling in from Dublin having just returned from Agadir, Morocco. Ryanair is launching a new winter sun route to the city, but that isn’t on our agenda.

Today, we are discussing the issue of air traffic controllers in France. Due to short staffing and strike action, and France’s positioning in Europe, French air traffic controllers have caused thousands of flight cancellations, countless delays and affected millions of passengers across Europe in recent years.

However, the strike action itself isn’t the “scandal” that O’Leary refers to. The scandal is twofold: that the European Commission has failed to protect overflights (flights that go through a country’s airspace without taking off or landing there) during French strike days, and that French politicians have failed to sufficiently staff their Air Traffic Control (ATC) units – the teams of air traffic controllers who should be preventing accidents and monitoring the flow of air traffic.

“Unacceptable” is the term used on Ryanair’s petition, which has accrued 2.2 million signatures. Or, indeed, “The f—ing sky doesn’t belong to the French” as O’Leary describes the matter.

‘Europe should protect the overflight’

This year (January 1 to October 22), Ryanair says that 11 million of its passengers have suffered “avoidable” disruption due to French air traffic control industrial action. Since 2023, there have been 99 days of strike action and countless hours of delays due to staff shortages.

On July 3 and July 4 2025 alone, industrial action by French ATC caused the cancellation of 1,422 flights and 3,713 flights were delayed, affecting more than one million passengers.

“Every day there’s a French ATC strike, we usually have to cancel about 600 flights at the instruction of French ATC,” says O’Leary. In total, a single day of French strike action could affect as many as 100,000 Ryanair passengers.

The thing that frustrates O’Leary is that barely any of the affected flights are actually travelling to France. Every day, approximately 20 per cent of all European flights are “overflights” that fly over, but do not touch the ground, in France.

This means that flights from the UK to Italy, Germany to Spain, Portugal to Poland, Ireland to Bulgaria, are affected on a day of French ATC strike action.

“And everybody’s trying to fly around France, which means that even the flights that do operate then are hugely delayed and blocked up,” he added. This year, on July 3 and 4, Eurocontrol estimates that airlines produced 60,000 excess tons of CO2 emissions as flights rerouted around France.

For years, Ryanair has lobbied Ursula von der Leyen and the European Commission to protect overflights in France during industrial action. There is precedent for this. When air traffic controllers in Spain, Italy and Greece go on strike, minimum service legislation ensures overflights are protected while local flights are cancelled, O’Leary argues.

O’Leary has argues that the European Commission has sat on its hands for too long - Europa Press News/Europa Press

“The French, of course, do exactly the opposite. They protect the local French flights. So Pierre and Angélique can continue travelling to the French airports, but the overflights are disproportionately cancelled.”

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This, O’Leary says, amounts to an interference in the single market: “This is the reason we’ve been campaigning, together with other airlines, for many years. We are calling on the European Commission and useless von der Leyen to get up off her arse.

“But of course, being the spineless politicians that they are, they keep retreating to this trope which is: the right to strike is a national power.

“We don’t want to stop the French air traffic controllers striking. They’re free to strike if they want, but they should cancel the French flight, and Europe should protect the overflight.”

‘We have a standby captain. ATC has no standby roster’

Strike action is only part of the problem. Since the pandemic, air traffic control centres across the UK and Europe have suffered from staffing shortages. Ryanair and other airlines, plus bodies such as Airlines for Europe, have long called on transport ministers across Europe to train and hire more controllers.

“Why have you got such massive air traffic control [problems] on Saturdays and Sundays in the summer?” O’Leary asks.

“It’s because – and NATS [National Air Traffic Services] is just as bad – Pierre or Graham don’t show up to work on Saturday mornings or Sunday mornings when they’re rostered to do so. But they suffer no consequences.

“And France, which of course is usually the byword for inefficiency and incompetence, two years ago did a new deal with the ATC unions, under which Pierre, if he doesn’t feel like it, can report up to three hours late for work in the morning and still be ‘on time’.

“Nothing is done by the European Commission to end this scandal. I should also say nothing is being done by the British Government.”

Mr O’Leary says that, because airlines are subject to stringent delay compensation regulations, they must keep a roster of standby captains and cabin crew on-hand for morning shifts, in case somebody calls in sick.

“Air traffic controllers never have a standby roster. If they’re down to the minimum numbers and then two of them wake up on a Saturday morning [and decide to] call in sick, they take out about 20 per cent of the ATC capacity. We have very few ATC capacity issues on Monday to Fridays during the summer. But on a Saturday and Sunday, whoops.

“ATC capacity shortages is a euphemism for staff who won’t show up to work.”

To raise awareness around this issue, Ryanair launched a website called “Air Traffic Control Ruined Your Flight”, showing the faces and email addresses of transport ministers in seven of Europe’s worst-affected countries for ATC disruption, including France, Spain, Germany and the UK.

‘A madcap communist idea’

So what, if anything, is being done to improve matters? In 1999, the European Commission launched the Single European Sky (SES) initiative in a bid to reform Europe’s fragmented air traffic management. However, 26 years later, the vision has not been fully realised.

“This is the madcap communist idea that Europe will be covered with one big air traffic control system and that everybody will receive Spanish pay rates and deliver French productivity. But the national ATC unions won’t agree to it, so nothing has happened for 20 years,” says O’Leary.

“So the airlines have completely given up on this abject failure of the Single Europeans Sky.”

Instead, airlines are pivoting in their demands, and Mr O’Leary is hopeful that change is on the horizon.

“I’m an optimist, one of life’s optimists, so I think it will improve because it’s going to get so bad, people will eventually rebel,” he says. “We will eventually embarrass ‘Ursula von der-layed again’ into doing something. We have unanimity across all of Europe’s airlines, including the flag carriers.

“Air traffic controllers must be fully staffed for the first wave of morning flights. They must have standby air traffic controllers.

“And you must protect overflights during national ATC strikes. And I think we will embarrass ‘Useless von der Leyen’ into actually taking this on.

“We need to keep calling her out, keep embarrassing her, keep embarrassing your Labour transport ministers who stand idly by while British flights to the continent are cancelled because France is having an ATC strike.

“Bring back the Royal Navy, when Britain used to actually get things done.”

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