Thursday, December 23, 2021
“Extremely high rate”
Sick leave forces Lufthansa to cancel flights
According to its own information, the group cannot say whether the numerous cases of illness at Lufthansa are due to the Corona variant Omikron. One thing is clear: because many pilots are canceled, some flights have to be canceled. It was recently said that the airline had refined its emergency plans.
So many pilots called in sick at Lufthansa that the first intercontinental flights had to be canceled. A company spokesman said that connections across the North Atlantic, for example to Boston, Houston and Washington, were particularly affected from December 23 to 26. It is in this traffic area that passengers can most easily be rebooked. A return flight to Japan has also been canceled.
“We planned with a very large buffer. But that is not enough for the extremely high sick rate,” said the spokesman. He did not want to speculate about a connection with the Corona variant Omikron, since Lufthansa was not informed about the type of diseases. First, the portal “aero.de” reported on the staff shortages, which can only be partially met with volunteers.
Affected is the sub-fleet of long-haul Airbus A330 / A340 aircraft, for which we are urgently looking for replacement pilots for the period up to the beginning of January. According to “aero.de”, the company warns in an internal circular: “Now, due to the increased disease rate, we are no longer able to manage all rounds. The crew dispatcher is already working on scenarios to thin out the flight plan.” In addition to the sickness reports, quarantine obligations after certain flights make personnel planning more difficult.
Christmas air traffic in full swing
The Lufthansa Group recently announced that it had refined the existing emergency concepts and made them more flexible during the Corona crisis. You always have reserves in the background, said a company spokesman with a view to the Omikron variant.
Tight negotiations are currently underway between the pilots’ union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) and the Lufthansa Group about the future cost structure of the parent company Lufthansa. This should shrink in favor of more cost-effective platforms such as Eurowings Discover, which would inevitably cost high-paying jobs at Lufthansa. Contracts were mutually terminated, so that strikes are theoretically possible again from the summer.
In Europe, the Christmas air traffic has fully started. In particular, the direct flight providers Easyjet (plus 41 percent compared to the previous week) and Wizz Air (plus 75 percent) significantly expanded their offerings in the week before Christmas (December 16-22), as figures from the flight safety organization EUROCONTROL show. Wizz, SAS and Ryanair also offered more connections than in the same week of the pre-crisis year 2019. Lufthansa is a long way from this with 21 percent fewer flights than two years ago. In the short term, she only expanded her program by 1 percent.