The Austrian military was rendered unable to monitor and protect the country’s airspace because its Air Force’s flight controllers had taken time off in lieu after building up excessive overtime.
An army spokesperson confirmed a corresponding media report describing the issue on November 17.
In case of a violation of Austrian airspace over the period from November 15 to November 17, the army could neither have identified nor intercepted an intruder.
The country’s 15 Eurofighter jets – that would normally be ready to take off within minutes – remained grounded at the Zeltweg military airport.
The underlying reason for the downtime was a shortage of service personnel, mainly flight controllers. The remaining staff had amassed considerable overtime and therefore took time off.
Michael Bauer, spokesman for the Defense Ministry, told Brussels Signal that this was an unprecedented situation. While the service-staff shortages have been going on for years in the past it was possible to keep airspace surveillance going through overtime. But now the breaking point had been reached. “On average our flight controllers have worked 77 hours in overtime each month”, Bauer said.
The Austrian military has accused the ministry responsible for public servants (BMKÖS), led since 2019 by Werner Kogler (Greens), of ignoring the problem of service-staff shortages. Many flight controllers would rather work for the civilian air traffic controller Austro Control, which pays higher salaries, namely up to 2.5 times as much.
Chief of the General Staff Rudolf Striedinger said: “The Defence Ministry has been working for years on solving the issue of too few flight controllers. But the BMKÖS does not understand or does not want to understand the scope of the problem.” He added that the military would like to raise the pay of air force flight controllers to match the salaries in the civilian sector.
A speaker for Minister Kogler denied that the Defence Ministry had revealed how serious the problem was. But as Michael Bauer told Brussels Signal there was even a site visit of BMKÖS representatives at the Zeltweg airport in October 2023.
The latest incident jeopardising airspace protection may not be the last: The personnel situation is expected to become critical around Christmas with further losses of airspace surveillance on the horizon.
Among those ridiculing the latest incident online, Franz Schellhorn, head of the libertarian think-tank Agenda Austria on X called it “Austria in a nutshell”.
