A hurriedly-imposed no-fly zone around the Bürgenstock resort — where U.S. Vice-President JD Vance and Iranian Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf kicked off cease-fire talks on Sunday — triggered an embarrassing chain reaction at Swiss air-navigation service provider Skyguide. At 06:00 on 21 June, the last-minute air-space restriction was loaded into Skyguide’s radar system in Dübendorf. Within minutes, the update caused multiple radar displays to freeze, forcing controllers to close the skies east of Bern and to halt all departures from Zurich Airport. Landings were permitted only for aircraft already on final approach. For business travellers the timing could hardly have been worse. Zurich handles more than 300 departures on a typical Sunday; at the peak of the outage, more than 60 flights were delayed and at least 18 were cancelled, according to airport operator Flughafen Zürich AG. Lufthansa and Swiss International Air Lines diverted long-haul arrivals to Milan and Vienna, while short-haul services were held on the ground at origin airports. Corporate travel managers said the lack of real-time information made it difficult to rearrange meetings and crew rotations. Skyguide engineers isolated the problem within two hours and began rebooting radar consoles. Departures resumed at 07:45, but the company kept a 10 % reduction on over-flights in place until Monday 22 June at 08:00, warning of residual delays as sectors were re-opened gradually. The incident follows a string of technical mishaps at European ATC centres and will add pressure on regulators to accelerate plans for the Single European Sky, a long-stalled project to harmonise air-traffic systems across the continent. In the short term, travel advisers recommend that passengers departing Swiss airports this week reconfirm flight status, allow extra connection time and keep contingency budgets for possible overnight stays. Airlines are waiving re-booking fees for affected itineraries; however, compensation under EU261 is unlikely because the glitch is deemed an extraordinary circumstance. Longer-term, the episode underlines the vulnerabilities that pop-up diplomatic summits can create in a tightly-coupled aviation network. Swiss authorities are expected to review their risk-assessment protocols for last-minute security zones and may require larger ‘shadow windows’ for software validation before future NOTAM uploads, according to industry sources.
Source: SWI swissinfo.ch
