A temporary fault in the German air traffic control system led to problems throughout the whole of Germany’s airspace on Friday, according to the air traffic control agency.
The fault, which has since been rectified, led to delays and cancellations. The glitch led to the loss of flight plans and weather data in particular, the agency said.
“The disruption has been resolved, the systems have been running again since 10:25 am [0825 GMT].” However, the data lost during the disruption would have to be re-entered, it said.
At Germany’s largest airport in Frankfurt there were “significant delays in operations and flight cancellations,” according to the website of the airport operator Fraport.
The company spoke of around 100 cancellations by the afternoon. Other airports such as Berlin, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart were also affected.
“We don’t expect many more cancellations because the problems have been fixed,” a spokesman said.
A Lufthansa spokesman said there were isolated flight cancellations and delays, and that no long-haul flights were affected.
There could still be some impact on the network on Friday, and the airport operator advised passengers to regularly check the flight status on the websites of the respective airlines.
A day earlier, chaotic conditions at Munich Airport’s Terminal 2 caused around 750 people to miss their originally booked flights.
Pictures of extremely long queues and hours-long waiting times in front of the security checks made the rounds on social media on Thursday’s Day of German Unity.
At a press conference on Friday afternoon, airport boss Jost Lammers spoke of the “very unusual arrival behaviour of passengers.”
Some people had “turned up six hours or more before departure,” Lammers said. Accordingly, the volume of traffic had accumulated.
When asked by a journalist why passengers were suddenly arriving earlier, he said only that this was a completely different pattern from the one observed in previous years.
Lammers apologised for the “long queues and considerable delays” over the past few days.
In order to ease the situation, passengers of Lufthansa subsidiary Discover Airlines have been channelled through different security gates to the normal procedure.
The airport and Lufthansa are also appealing to passengers not to arrive at security checkpoints more than three hours before departure.
