Many travellers flying to or from Switzerland’s two largest international airports have had to face some disruptions in recent weeks.
It's all been to do with problems, in one form or another, of Skyguide, Switzerland’s air traffic control system.
Let’s look at Geneva first.
On June 25th, heavy rains flooded the basement of the control tower, affecting the cooling of the data centre.
As a result, “due to the risk of the air traffic control systems overheating, Skyguide temporarily closed the airspace in the Geneva area shortly after 22:00 for safety reasons,” the agency said in a press release, adding that “no take-offs or landings could take place.”
The system started to function normally again on June 26th, with 70 percent of scheduled flights being able to take off and land.
Skyguide lifted all capacity restrictions in Geneva's airspace on June 28th.
Meanwhile, in Zurich…
As Geneva’s problems were getting resolved, Zurich's airspace control centre was facing its own woes.
On July 5th, a bug in Skyguide's software led to massive restrictions at Zurich Airport for about an hour and a half, affecting 68 flights: 18 takeoffs and 19 landings had to be canceled, while 31 flights were delayed for up to two hours.
In all, 1,900 passengers were affected by the system’s breakdown.
Are these problems unusual?
Such problems do occasionally pop up.
The most serious happened in June 2022, when a technical malfunction shut down Swiss airspace for several hours.
Experts questioned whether a cyber-attack was for blame for the outage, with some even suspecting Russia of these actions.
However, an investigation found that the malfunction was caused by a defect in a network switch — the network component did not have the latest version of software.
At that time, an independent investigation report contained 14 recommendations to prevent such breakdowns from happening in the future.
They included setting up a business continuity management system (BCMS) to better protect processes and systems critical to air traffic control and to enable alternative operations.
Next technical failures had occurred in 2023, spilling over to the first six months of 2024 — that is, the current ones.
Will these glitches affect your summer travel plans?
This is, of course, difficult to predict, especially when natural disasters (as was the case in Geneva), strike.
What is certain is that nobody — not the Skyguide, airlines, or passengers — want such problems to recur.
“Such bottlenecks have a major impact on our system," according to Oliver Buchhofer, operations manager for SWISS airline, the main carrier in both Zurich and Geneva. “If there are delays, they are practically impossible to make up for on the same day. "
This means that passengers will be stranded, as their airplane is not be able to either land or take off, for hours or maybe even longer.
In order to prevent technical breakdowns from disrupting, or even paralysing, air traffic, a special expert panel was set up after the incident in Zurich on July 6th. They will investigate what exactly happened and recommend ways to strengthen the system.
Can you seek compensation if your flight is affected by such disruptions?
In principle, neither SWISS nor any other airline, will offer any compensation for flights cancelled due to natural disasters (like Geneva's thunderstorms) or third parties' technical glitches
However, they will re-book you on the next available flight and get you to your destination sooner or later.
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