Impact of the French ATC strike of 3 & 4 July 2025 on European Aviation

In light of last week’s two days of industrial action, EUROCONTROL’s new Aviation Trends paper takes a timely look at how air traffic control (ATC) strikes in one busy country can have a disproportionately large impact on the European network as a whole.

It finds that on 3 and 4 July 2025, the industrial action by French air traffic controllers:

affected more than 1 million passengers with around 200,000 unable to fly as they had intended as a result of cancellations
delayed on average 3,713 flights on each strike day, 10.7% of all flights
caused on average 1,422 cancellations on each strike day, 4.7% of all scheduled flights
pushed average June arrival punctuality down from 75% to 64% on average for the two strike days
resulted in arrival delays to all non-cancelled flights of on average 24 minutes, 10 minutes more than on a normal day
had major impacts not only on flights arriving in, or departing from, France (where arrival punctuality dropped from 73% to 50%), but also in neighbouring countries, most notably Spain, the UK and Italy, with the strike causing a total of 354,000 minutes of direct air traffic flow management (ATFM) delays across the network
raised the average ATFM delay of a delayed flight to 41 minutes, with 6% of delayed flights (425 in total) delayed by more than 2 hours
impacted negatively the environment, with an average additional 18,000 tons of fuel burnt and 60,000+ excess tons of CO₂ emissions
cost European aviation approximately €47M in delay costs, and an estimated €73M in cancellation costs - a total cost of around €120M for the two strike days.