GENEVA: Swiss airspace reopened on Wednesday morning after a computer glitch grounded flights across the country for several hours, officials said.

“Swiss airspace is now open again,” the Alpine nation’s air traffic control service Skyguide said on Twitter, adding “the technical malfunction at Skyguide has been resolved”.

It did not say what had caused the problem that shut Swiss airspace for hours on Wednesday morning, but said that “air traffic over Switzerland and operations at the national airports of Geneva and Zurich are resuming”. Those airports too announced that flights had begun taking off.

“Good news! Air traffic has gradually resumed since 8:30am,” Geneva airport said in a tweet, warning that a number of flights had been cancelled and urging passengers to check with their airlines. Zurich airport also said flight operations were “running again” at full capacity by 10am.

But it warned that “delays are to be expected today. We still recommend passengers to check with their airline about the status of their flight.”

At Geneva airport, where the first morning flights were delayed by more than three hours, dozens of travellers crowded around the information screens, with phones stuck to their ears.

Airport spokesman Ignace Jeannerat said that around 2,000 people had seen their flights affected, adding that while flights were resuming, there would not be a return to normal before early on Thursday.

“We are trying to find a solution,” Sandrine Vert, 52, said, after her family’s easyJet flight to Split in Croatia was cancelled.

She, her husband and teenage daughter, who drove to the airport from Annecy in France, had been told there were now no flights from Geneva to Split until Friday, putting their one-week holiday plans on the line. “Our vacation could fall through,” she said.

The chaos erupted when Skyguide announced it had “experienced a technical malfunction in the early hours of this morning, which is why Swiss airspace has been closed to traffic for safety reasons”.

Published in Dawn,June 16th, 2022