Air traffic is definitely complicated this week, a few days before the start of the school holidays. All takeoffs had to be interrupted at Zurich airport on Friday afternoon, while only half of the planes bound for Kloten were allowed to land. The cause was a computer problem that affected Skyguide. “Important data is missing from the flight plans,” said a spokesperson for the air traffic controller, specifying that the failure was caused by two applications that were not communicating properly with each other. The planes were allowed to take off again around 4:30 p.m.
This computer outage also had an impact on the Swiss team, on the eve of its round of 16 of Euro 2024 against Italy. The Nati was in fact due to fly from Stuttgart to Berlin on Friday evening at 5 p.m., aboard a Swiss aircraft from Zurich.
With the flight delayed by more than an hour, the pre-match press conference scheduled at the Olympic Stadium in the German capital is also likely to be delayed.
At the beginning of the week, traffic was disrupted in Geneva during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, due to major storms that hit the La Côte region. A flood in the premises of the control center disrupted the work of Skyguide. Around sixty flights were affected.
These facts recall the major outage that Skyguide experienced on June 15, 2022, when due to a faulty switch, Kloten airport and airspace had to be completely closed for five hours.
