MORE AVIATION WOES: Frankfurt diverts all flights and union calls for Friday strike at German airports

Germany’s air traffic control agency said Wednesday that it is diverting all flights away from the country’s busiest airport, Frankfurt, after a problem with Lufthansa’s computer systems caused major disruption at the German airline.

Agency spokesman Robert Ertler said all plane parking spots in Frankfurt were full because passengers and crews are unable to board the airline’s flights.

“All incoming planes are being diverted to alternative airports” such as as Munich, Nuremberg and Duesseldorf, Ertler told The Associated Press.

Lufthansa Group, which also includes subsidiaries such as Swiss International Air Lines and Eurowings, said the IT outage was caused by construction works in the Frankfurt region.

“This is causing flight delays and cancellations,” the company said. “We regret the inconvenience this is causing our passengers.”

Telephone company Deutsche Telekom later confirmed that an excavator had cut through fiber optic lines at a depth of five meters (16 feet) while working on a railroad line.

The company said parts of the destroyed line had already been repaired and the situation will improve significantly in the course of Wednesday afternoon, German news agency dpa reported.

According to dpa all of Lufthansa’s domestic flights were cancelled and passengers were urged to switch to alternative forms of travel, such as trains.

And if that wasn’t enough bad news …

A German labor union has called on workers at seven of the country’s airports, including the two biggest, to go on strike Friday to press demands for inflation-busting pay increases.

Verdi said Wednesday that the one-day walkout by civil aviation security and ground staff would affect the airports in Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Dortmund, Hannover and Bremen.

Munich airport said later in the afternoon that it would suspend most passenger flights because of the walk-out – with the exception of relief flights, flights for medical, technical and other emergencies, and flights for the Munich Security Conference, which begins on Friday.

Still, the strike is likely to affect arrivals of those scheduled to come on regular flights to attend the annual conference which runs through Sunday.

More than 700 takeoffs and landings were planned in Munich, Germany’s second biggest airport, on Friday.

Frankfurt is the country’s biggest airport and a major hub for intercontinental travel.

The union is demanding a pay rise of 10.5% to counter the effects of high inflation that their members have endured.