Aeropuertos Españoles y Navegación Aérea (Aena) has issued a statement highlighting that 47 controllers abandoned their jobs in the Canary Islands between the afternoon of Friday, December 3, and the morning of Saturday, the 4th. It has also denounced that the Unión Sindical de Controladores Aéreos (Usca) is trying to "deceive public opinion by denying that the decision of the air traffic controllers to massively abandon their jobs was what forced the airspace to be closed".
Specifically, Aena assures that during Friday, 25 controllers from the afternoon and night shifts did not go to their post or were absent from it in the Canary Islands Control Center and that during the night of that same day, another four did the same in the tower of the Gran Canaria airport. It also explains that during Saturday morning there were 18 controllers who did not go to or abandoned their jobs in the Islands, one from the Canary Islands Control Center, three from the Fuerteventura tower, two from the Gran Canaria tower, three from the Lanzarote tower, four from Tenerife North and five from Tenerife South.
"Not content with having kidnapped hundreds of thousands of citizens at the airports during Friday and Saturday, the controllers' union is trying to continue deceiving public opinion by claiming that no controller abandoned his job on Friday and that Aena unnecessarily ordered the airspace to be closed", the public entity insists in the statement.
Aena recommends to the representatives of the controllers "to face their responsibilities for the events they starred in recent days, instead of trying to spread false information and accusations to citizens who know perfectly well what happened since they suffered its consequences, as has happened several times in recent years".
The "irresponsibility" of the controllers
"In their irresponsibility, the air traffic controllers may be suggesting that Aena should have let the planes continue flying without security measures", says Aena, who recalls that around 4:00 p.m. on Friday (Canarian time) the spokesman for the controllers' union, Camilo Cela, assured that "they were not going to take measures against the Decree Law approved by the Government". "The air traffic controllers on duty at that time in the towers and control centers throughout Spain simultaneously began to declare themselves unfit to continue providing the service and abandoning their jobs", indicates Aena.
"Faced with this massive abandonment, and to guarantee the safety of air traffic, Aena had to gradually reduce activity in the centers and control towers until reaching total closure when there were no controllers in their positions to control the airspace. In total, 440 controllers abandoned the service" throughout Spain, the note concludes.
ACN Press