French Air Traffic Controllers strike again and it can only mean one thing – good weather ahead!

Yes, they are at it again! The French Air Traffic Controllers are on strike today and tomorrow and are planning more walkouts over the next month.  The team at EUclaim had often commented that not only were the French ATC persistent strikers, but their strikes always seemed to coincide with fine weather!  So we had a quick glance at BBC Weather and we were not at all surprised to see that the forecast for the 8th – 9th April was very promising indeed.

Paris  17 degrees -19 degrees

Marseille – 15 degrees

Bordeaux – 18 – 20 degrees

Perhaps, we thought, the French ATC have a direct link to the early forecasting department at the Met Office which they check before striking? Now, we’re not a company that casts aspersions, we rely on our vast amounts of airline data to prove our points on all the flight delay compensation cases we handle. So, we decided to check out our theory. We took a look at our data covering both the dates of the strikes and the weather patterns over the last two years to see if we could spot any links. And we were right! Bar some light rain in January 2014 in Marseille, every of the nine days that the French ATC have been on strike it was exceptional weather.* see table below

The next series of strikes are planned for 16-18 April and 29 April – 2 May. It’s too early to predict the weather later in the month and sadly travellers caught up in the French ATC walkouts will not be able to claim flight delay compensation but on the upside there’s a high chance of super weather.

*French Air Traffic Control strikes June 2013 – June 2014

weather during French ATC strikes

  • Weather at 12.00
  • The French Air Traffic Controllers strike in June 2014 caused the most problems for passengers with some 50, 000 people delayed.  The strike on the 24th of June was the worst with 574 incidents.

Photo: Flickr.com

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