Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I am, I hope, like you, enjoying the Friday sunshine.

It's a beautiful day here at noon in central London and I've just flown in from Geneva.

The significance of that is, well, partly, that it's actually the busiest day today since 2019 for aviation in Europe.

Yes, it is.

The Eurocontrol have been gradually handling more and more flights in Europe they

hit a record since 2019 last Friday at just over 34,000 it's going to go slightly

higher today because we're on a Friday the busiest day and it's in July busiest month. So if you're going to an

airport, then you can expect not to be alone, I imagine, and I hope that you will be suitably on time.

But crucially, you may have been hearing about reports that Euro control staff are going to go on strike

and that could cause the cancellation of more than 10,000 flights a day.

Well, I've been trying to find out what I can.

That's partly why I'm recording this relatively late in the day.

And I have not yet got a word out of Eurocontrol,

or indeed out of the Union Syndicale Brucell,

the union that represents these air traffic controllers.

Now, just to tell you what is going on here,

Eurocontrol is the omniscient

being that controls everything to do with air traffic control in Europe. And the way that it works

is that, well, my flight today, for instance, from Geneva to London Heathrow, the pilots would have got to put a flight plan in,

which would have involved Swiss, French and British airspace.

Conceivably also have involved Luxembourg and Brussels, Belgium airspace.

But that needs to go through the control centre in Brussels

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