Coronavirus: Lufthansa expects to cancel 33,000 flights this winter because of Omicron, according to the press





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BERLIN (Reuters) – Lufthansa plans to cancel 33,000 flights from its winter program due to the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, which is leading to further travel restrictions, the group’s chairman said German air transport company, Carsten Spohr, at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper.

“From mid-January and until February, we expect a sharp drop in bookings,” he told the weekly, adding that the 33,000 canceled flights corresponded to around 10% of the flight schedule. flights for the winter.

This decrease in bookings is particularly evident in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium, all countries particularly affected by the epidemic resumption, observed Carsten Spohr.

He said the number of flights canceled in January due to lower demand should have been even higher if the group had not had to charter flights to ensure they keep their take-off and landing slots. .

“We must operate 18,000 additional superfluous flights over the winter period simply to secure our take-off and landing slots”, he stressed, deploring that the European Union is not doing more to reduce the scale of these ” ghost flights “, contrary to its objectives of combating global warming.

European rules, which force airlines to use 80% of their slots to keep them the following year, have been lightened since the start of the pandemic.

The European Commission had set the slot utilization rate at 50% for the winter of 2021-2022 and in mid-December adopted a rate of 64% for the next flight schedule over the summer period (from March 28 to October 29 2022).

(Report Miranda Murray, French version Myriam Rivet, edited by Bertrand Boucey)









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