HASfter a closure of several hours, the Swiss sky “is reopened”. Swiss air traffic control announced this Wednesday, June 15, at the start of the morning, the closure “until further notice” of national airspace. It was reopened around 9 a.m., the same organization said. For its part, Geneva airport was paralyzed on Wednesday June 15, at the start of the morning, due to a computer failure at the air traffic controller Skyguide, indicated a tweet from Geneva airport and the agency ATS- Keystone. Around 9 a.m., the airport said that its traffic was resuming “gradually”.
“A technical breakdown occurred at Skyguide, the Swiss air traffic control service, in the early hours of the morning, which is why Swiss airspace was closed to traffic for safety reasons,” the statement said. from Skyguide. The company gave no explanation of the reasons for the outage, stating only that “this closure of airspace applies until further notice” and stressing that the company “deplores this incident and its consequences for its customers, partners and passengers of Geneva and Zurich airports and is working hard to find a solution”.
A spokeswoman for Zurich Airport, the other major air hub in the Alpine country, said the airport remained open despite the outage. According to the ATS-Keystone agency, international flights to Switzerland have been diverted to, in particular, Milan airport in northern Italy.
Good news ! Air traffic has gradually resumed since 8:30 a.m. Several flights are cancelled. Travelers are asked to check with their company if their flight is maintained.
— Geneva Airport (@GeneveAeroport) June 15, 2022
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Airplanes diverted to Germany
The Zurich airport website shows that United Airlines flight UA134 from New York was diverted to Frankfurt airport in western Germany, while Singapore Airlines flight SQ346 from from the city-state was diverted to southern Germany and Munich airport.
Zurich is Switzerland’s leading airport with more than 10.2 million passengers boarding or passing through its terminals in 2021. With the gradual lifting of health restrictions, traffic has increased sharply since March, approaching levels month after month. before the pandemic. Traffic rose to 1.3 million passengers in March, then to more than 1.8 million in April and to more than 1.9 million in May at this airport, which increased the number of destinations served to 191 for the period. summer with the resumption of tourism.
In Geneva, just over 5.9 million passengers had traveled through this airport, while air traffic was like in Zurich still severely affected by health restrictions. But since March, traffic has picked up significantly, once again surpassing the one million passenger mark per month. With the resumption of tourism, in May, 1.14 million passengers used this airport, according to provisional statistics from Geneva airport.
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