Factual information: I do not live in France
Not sure if you (personal “you”) were using the personal “you” or the impersonal, generic “you”
Sure, they’re welcome to fuck up their own shit. They’re not welcome to virtually shut down intra-EU air traffic every time the unions decide the government’s done something they don’t like. That’s bullshit, and if the EU means anything (isn’t it supposed to be some sort of trade organization, or some other bullshit along those lines), it should be making sure that intra-EU trade (and hence the flow of money) isn’t disrupted like this every time the French unions feel like it.
Epic lulz. Have you been sleeping for the past thirty years?
You’re French? Allow me to roll my eyes at you. Your sob story is touching, yet it’s a problem you and your own countrymen created. It’s got fuck all to do with the rest of the EU.
The French government haven’t shut the airspace down; the unions have. You can harp on about “sovereignty” all you like. There needs to be treaty obligations in place within the EU to draft in external ATCs when this sort of shit happens.
I wont! I wont! You cannot make me! 
You are right of course. I dont have a very complete picture of the situation. This thread is helping though. Thanks.
We don’t. We really don’t*. Everyone *hates the “casseurs”, those “professional rioters” I touched upon earlier.
Shopkeepers and locals hate them for obvious reasons. Demonstrators hate them because they turn peaceful political activities with an actual purpose, point, message and demands into a violent farce, with a predictable end result. Especially considering, of course, the evening news will only mention and document the violence, negating and/or denying the original purpose of the gathering and reducing it to the fringe event… Not to mention, demonstrators get assaulted by them as well. Unions and political activists probably hate them the most - after all, they’re the real professional demonstrators. Clashes between the two groups aren’t unheard of.
The only people who kinda like them are the cops - because “breakers” showing up means they now have full license to go in full riot gear, tear gas and rubber pellets blazing. It’s little wonder many suspect at least some of the casseurs to be cops themselves or at least agents provocateurs working for or with them…
My theory is that the strikes is a stimulus package. All the burning cars will drive up car sales, boosting the economy.
Air traffic over their country is their own shit. If you don’t like how they’re running it, don’t fly over their country.
I was going to ask how the police are perceived during normal times.
The EU has a legitimate interest in ensuring free movement and trade within the Eurozone (the whole raison d’etre of the EU in the first place). Imports and exports to France are also the French’s “own shit”. It still isn’t legal for them to enact a trade barrier on British goods. Why shouldn’t affecting intra-EU air traffic like this also not be proscripted?
Little wonder because it’s natural for the protesters to see the police as being a kind of opposition.
But like most conspiracy theories, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’d bet my own pension savings that there is no systemic use of “agents provocateurs”.
Yes, but the issue of sovreignty still resides with the government. They’d probably like to let people continue to fly over France, they just don’t have the manpower to make it possible. And if they could assign the air traffic control functions to an outside agency, wouldn’t that weaken the leverage of the strikers?
I’ve no idea if it’s logistically possible, though. And even if you could get foreign controllers into the loop, much of the infrastructure (transmitters, navigational beacons, etc.) probably have to be in the land that’s being flown over. I wouldn’t put it past the strikers to cut power to those things, which would disable things anyway.
I suppose the military could do it.
I doubt any military would have the trained manpower to handle the air traffic for a country the size of France.
You’d also most likely have a problem with the unions and workers in the country you are trying to get the air traffic controllers from.
There speaks someone who obviously doesn’t live in London and get regularly, royally screwed by the transport unions. And I wouldn’t speak from such a lofty perch just yet - with the drastic spending cuts the Tories are about to announce, I can here the public sector union masters hammering their placards from here.
Are you saying that Freedonian air traffic controllers would have more loyalty to their French counterparts than to the civil aviation authorities within Freedonia?
I can see some other government declining to help because they didn’t want to get dragged into a domestic situation in France, but I didn’t realize the whole “workers of the world, unite” thing was still such a force in Europe.
Please! Does everything have to be brought to the nth degree with ye lot? I’m not saying anything specifically but if you don’t think that unions who work together on an international basis, and I’m only assuming that air traffic unions have some degree of contact* with another, may not be the most helpful with their bosses if asked to go outside their contracts and help break/weaken a strike by taking over the air traffic control of another country.
Yes, in theory it should be possible to route aircraft through French airspace using agencies outside of France. However, I think the European countries don’t want to set a precedent for doing that over a national airspace without the consent of the country involved.
:dubious: France isn’t that big, area-wise. If the French aircraft are grounded and no one is landing or taking off it greatly simplifies the issues involved. I think there are several countries where the military has sufficient manpower to do this if sufficiently motivated, and collectively the EU as a whole no doubt has it as well.
Did you attempt to sue that Icelandic volcano earlier this year for inconvenience as well?
Comparing the inconvenience of a detoured flight, a delay of an hour or two, or perhaps a canceled flight to a nation-wide general strike is ridiculous and shows that the person whining about being inconvenienced is also a self-entitled jerk.
Did you forget that EU stands for Economic Union?. The rest of Europe does, in fact, have connections to France. If France goes down the toilet it will impact the rest of the EU, so yeah, maybe the rest of the EU should give a damn.
Definitely not if they try directing takeoffs and landings. I’m pretty sure, however, that the French Air Force has enough trained air traffic controllers to supervise flights *passing over *France.
Ahhh, point taken.
The military ? That would be absolutely impossible.
In France, when a cop sneezes, it’s already perceived as an unacceptable fascist demonstration of force (which recalls the darkest hours of our history), so the army…