Mapping the impact of air traffic control strikes on air traffic patterns. A case study of central Europe using open ADS-B flight data

Air traffic control is vital in ensuring safe and efficient airspace usage by aircraft. In the event of a strike by air traffic controllers, flights can be delayed, cancelled, and rerouted. While there is previous research in the geospatial analysis of flight data, the approaches and tools used are complex and specialized, leaving a gap for an accessible and easily adaptable practice for the geospatial analysis of flight data, primarily using geographic information systems. We successfully bridged this gap with the methods of this article, increasing the accessibility of future geospatial flight data analysis. The flight data we used is broadcast by aircraft in regular intervals, including both spatial information and supplemental aircraft information. By detecting differences in the air traffic patterns between the day of an air traffic control strike in France and other reference days (used for normalization), we were able to determine both the spatial change of flight density in and around France and the difference in the number of flights that flew through French airspace on the day of the strike. On the day of the strike, the area around French airspace experienced a higher density of flights. In total, French airspace experienced around 2.7 %–7.1 % more air traffic on normal days than on the day of the strike. Mapping flight densities and systematically comparing them between the observed days highlighted corridors within French airspace that experienced significantly higher air traffic, presumably as a consequence of strike management, simplifying the routes that aircraft took in comparison to normal operations. The most prominent corridor consists of a line from Barcelona to western Italy, with another one spanning the distance between the greater Paris area and the border of French and Spanish airspace near the Atlantic coastline.