CAIRO, 13 May 2005 — Several airlines, including Gulf Air, canceled their flight to Egypt after a go-slow by Egyptian air traffic controllers who continued their strike yesterday at Cairo International Airport.
General director of stations at Egypt Air, Mohsen Khalil, told reporters that Gulf Air, the German airline Lufthansa and other airlines cancelled flights to Cairo due to a go-slow of air traffic controllers. As a result, passengers of six Egypt Air flights were stuck on planes for two to four hours, he added.
Some 500 air traffic controllers continued their strike after the government refused to listen to their demands. Minister of Civil Aviation Ahmed Shafiq fired four air controllers who led the strike but told reporters that the ministry will meet with air traffic controllers to negotiate with them, but did not elaborate. He said however, that if they continue their strike more of them would face sanctions and imprisonment.
The minister said that the slowdown had caused $31 million in losses to the national carrier. Foreign airlines, suffering a spike in fuel costs as their planes circle for hours before being cleared for landing, are threatening to demand compensation.
“What the air traffic controllers are doing by delaying the flights is a violation of civil aviation law,” Shafiq told reporters. “Imprisonment is an obligatory punishment according to the law.”
Several Arab and international airline companies have filed complaints to the Civil Aviation Ministry on Tuesday saying they may face huge losses if flights continued to be delayed.
During the sit-in that began on Tuesday, the workers continued to handle the minimum number of flights per minute, so that traffic through the nation’s airports continued, though many flights were delayed.
“If the government is not listening to us then we do have the right not to do all the required tasks as we are not getting all of our rights,” said Magdy Abdel Hadi, head of the Air Traffic Controllers’ Union. “We are willing to get back to our work the minute someone from the ministry carries out our demand,” he told Arab News.
The controllers held a similar strike on March 10 but decided to end their sit-in after receiving a message from the president ensuring them that their demands would be carried out.
The controllers’ main demand is an immediate 100 percent increase in wages, followed by another 25 percent increase for the two coming years and then a steady 10 percent increase per year. They also called for administrative reforms to improve the promotion system, and the subsidization of the insurance fund with an additional 2 million Egyptian pounds deducted from their wages to ensure a better retirement scheme.
