Air France strike

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Ordered a flight to france? Cancel it now.

Flight cancellations
Air France - unspecified but large number
British Airways group: 128
Lufthansa: 70
Scandinavian Airlines: 27
Additional cancellations by Olympic, Lot, Buzz, Ryanair, others
Police counted 30,000 demonstrators marching through the Left Bank to the beat of drums under union banners, letting off coloured flares in the November gloom.

A public sector strike has forced the cancellation of thousands of flights across France in the biggest labour challenge to the centre-right government since its election in June.

Air traffic controllers joined postal workers, bus, metro and train drivers, hospital workers and electricity and telephone utility staff in marches through major cities.

The mass protest has been called by unions angry at government moves towards privatisation, pension reforms and spending cuts.

BBC correspondent Valerie Jones reports from Paris that the demonstration was so large it took more than two hours for all the protesters to leave the starting-point.

Union officials put the figure closer to 60,000 and several thousand demonstrators also took to the streets of the second city, Marseilles, and the technological powerhouse of Toulouse.

One demonstrator in Paris told the BBC that the future of flagship state companies like the rail network, the SNCF, was at stake:

"We don't want the SNCF becoming like the British railways."

But the new French government remained unswayed by Tuesday's mass protest as one MP with the ruling party, Herve Mariton, told the BBC:

"The government is hearing what is being said but the government is intent on reform - this is necessary in our country."

Skies empty

The biggest disruption was to airports, with all but long-haul flights badly affected.

France's civil aviation authority (DGAC) said it could guarantee that only about 500 of some 4,300 scheduled international flights would depart as planned.

Deserted check-in area at Nice Airport
Air France, British Airways, Lufthansa, Lot, Scandinavian Airlines, Olympic Airways and other airlines slashed their schedules.

The action affected other parts of Europe as flights from Spain and Amsterdam's Schiphol airport were diverted to avoid French airspace, and flights from Geneva to Britain were delayed.

Action by public transport staff, while less severe, also caused disruption.

Morning commuters in Paris were forced to walk the last 250 metres (yards) into the busy Gare du Nord station when their trains were caught in a bottleneck caused by industrial action.

While rail and bus services in the capital appeared to stabilise by the afternoon, the disruption was much more severe in the provinces with no buses running in Bordeaux and only 5 % in Marseille, where a metro strike also caused chaos.

Union split

French lorry-drivers, meanwhile, appear to have largely abandoned their blockade campaign, although two of the unions involved insist they have not given up.

Police broke up several protests on Monday, detaining drivers or threatening to confiscate their driving licences.

On Tuesday, a few fresh blockades were reported, but correspondents said the government's policy of clamping down early on the blockades appeared to have worked.

The leaders of France's two biggest unions, the CGT and the CFDT, rounded on the leader of the other big union, Force Ouvriere (FO), after it pulled out of the strike on Monday.

CFDT leader Francois Chereque said he was "stupified" by FO tactics and accused FO leader Marc Blondel of short-changing drivers in a private-sector dispute while backing strikes in the public sector.

Well, its the biggest flight union in le france... So warn all your friends and loved.