Holiday frustration instead of wanderlust
Flight chaos will not normalize until next year
By Juliane Kipper
06/28/2022, 5:20 p.m
The shortage of staff at airlines and airports is exacerbated by the high number of corona infections. Canceled flights cause frustration. Service providers from abroad should remedy the situation. But it will still be weeks before the first workers at German airports get involved.
Canceled flights, hours of waiting, abandoned suitcases: the start of the summer holidays is a stress test for many holidaymakers at German airports. There is a shortage of staff at the airports, among other things in handling and security checks: many employees who have not yet turned their backs on the industry are now absent due to corona.
Temporary workers from Turkey and some Balkan countries are supposed to remedy the situation. According to aviation expert Gerald Wissel from the consulting company Airborne, however, these will only lead to a slight alleviation of the current flight chaos – and not until August at the earliest. “The flight chaos will continue for the entire summer flight schedule. So until the end of October,” says Wissel ntv.de. These problems should be completely resolved by the summer of next year at the latest.
Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr has already prepared the passengers for further difficulties in air traffic. After the increase in air traffic after the corona pandemic from almost zero to almost 90 percent, the industry could not deliver the usual reliability, robustness and punctuality, Spohr wrote in an open letter from the group’s board of directors to customers. “We can only apologize to you for this and want to be completely honest: In the next few weeks, with further increases in passenger numbers, whether vacation or business trips, the situation will hardly improve in the short term.” Not only at Lufthansa, but in the entire industry there were still too many employees missing. The industry is planning several thousand new hires in Europe alone. “However, this increase in capacity will only have a stabilizing effect in the coming winter.” In the summer of 2023, the situation in global aviation should be much more reliable, explained the group’s top management.
“You earn a lot more with garbage collection”
The airline recently announced that it would cancel a further 2,200 flights during the main holiday season at the hubs in Frankfurt am Main and Munich – in addition to the 900 connections on Fridays and weekends in July announced at the beginning of June.
After two years of the pandemic, there is a real rush for flights. But instead of the industry taking off again, the need to catch up was underestimated, according to aviation expert Wissel. Airports and airlines should have started training crews who were previously on short-time work much earlier. Pilots and cabin crew are obliged to do this after a long break. “Even the airports themselves should have hired staff earlier after the large wave of layoffs,” says Wissel. Not only did a number of people go on short-time work at the beginning of the corona pandemic, but many lost their job completely.
Even if the personnel from abroad can alleviate the flight chaos somewhat, according to Wissel it cannot be a lasting solution to fill the personnel gap with thousands of workers from south-eastern Europe. Rather, the working conditions in this country should be more attractive. “You earn a lot more with garbage collection than, for example, the so-called loaders on the apron who load the luggage. That’s a problem,” says Wissel. The aviation expert hopes that everyone involved will understand that safe and reliable flying has its price and that the cost screw in these sensitive areas cannot be further tightened.
According to the Federal Ministry of Transport, the aviation industry is currently short of around 2,000 employees in all areas. The airport works councils estimate the total requirement nationwide at 5,500 workers and according to a study by the German Economic Institute, there is currently a shortage of around 7,200 skilled workers at German airports.
Final decision is still pending
In order to cope with the handling chaos, the German airports and their ground service providers want to hire the foreign temporary staff for a limited period of up to three months, said the general manager of the airport association ADV, Ralph Beisel. The federal government had signaled its approval of the industry plan at the weekend. However, a final decision in coordination with the Ministries of Labour, the Interior and Transport is still pending. In particular, it is about the waiver of the so-called priority check, whether domestic employees are not also available for the jobs.
However, it will probably be a few weeks before the first workers recruited from abroad start working at German airports. A personnel service provider from Istanbul has already offered up to 2,000 workers for the loading services, which are particularly overloaded at the larger airports, according to industry circles. They would have prior airport experience and the appropriate documentation for quick background checks. The Federal Ministry of the Interior expects that they can still be used during the summer vacation period.
The workers recruited at short notice could be used, for example, in baggage handling, said the spokesman for the ministry, Maximilian Kall. “This is out of the question for the security checks because of the training that is required there and the security standards that apply there,” he added. The spokesman emphasized that anyone who works in baggage handling must also go through a security check. This review by the respective state authorities takes about two weeks.