Ryanair cancels 400 flights in Europe due to French air traffic controller strikes

Ryanair has been forced to cancel 400 flights as a result of strikes by French air traffic controllers, the airline’s boss has said, as he urged the European Union to “take action”.

The mass cancellations across Europe on Tuesday – representing one in eight flights scheduled by the continent’s largest airline – are merely the latest to be grounded by industrial action, with walkouts at airports blamed by Ryanair for more than 4,000 cancellations this year so far.

As thousands of would-be passengers saw their travel plans cast into disarray on Tuesday, “livid” holidaygoers described finding themselves stranded in airports and forced to find last-minute accommodation as they expressed their dismay on social media.

In a furious message, Ryanair’s chief executive Michael O’Leary criticised the “utterly indefensible” move to cancel overflights passing through French airspace, as he accused authorities there of “prioritising” domestic flights.

Air traffic controllers joined other unions as hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets across France on Tuesday in protest at president Emmanuel Macron raising the retirement age by two years to 64, as some demonstrators stormed the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

While France’s civil aviation authority asked airlines to cancel a third of the flights out of Paris-Orly, the capital’s number two airport, the air traffic control strikes forced hundreds of overflight cancellations – as the staff required to guide planes through French airspace walked out.

Ryanair has been pushing for the European Commission to force France to protect overflights during such strikes, having last week submitted a petition Mr O’Leary said was “signed by over 1.1 million of our very fed up customers”.

In a video message posted to Twitter, the airline boss said: “Again today we’ve had to cancel just about 400 flights out of the 3,200 flights we’d scheduled to operate. All of these flights have been cancelled because of French ATC strikes. The vast majority of these flights are overflights and not going to France.

“We respect the right of French ATC union to strike but if they go…