Lufthansa cancels 1,200 flights due to airport strike action

DEUTSCHE Lufthansa will cancel at least 1,200 flights scheduled on Friday (Feb 17) due to strikes at its main hubs of Frankfurt and Munich, the latest disruption to hit Europe’s biggest airline after an IT incident grounded its fleet on Wednesday.

Lufthansa will cull the flights because of a one-day walkout by ground crew at its two biggest airports, a spokeswoman said on Thursday. The move is set to complicate travel plans for delegates attending the Munich Security Conference, a major annual event for defence- and foreign-policy makers.

“The employees are jointly putting pressure on the respective employers because no results have been achieved in the previous negotiations,” labour union Verdi official Christine Behle said, pointing to the next round of talks on Feb 22.

The walkout will take place at seven airports, including Frankfurt – the country’s largest – and Munich. The action is the latest in a series of strikes amid slow progress in talks over pay and conditions for security and other ground staff. Verdi is seeking a significant boost to wages for workers hit by higher energy prices and record inflation.

It will be yet another blow to Lufthansa, which had to ground its entire fleet on Wednesday, after workers accidentally damaged a set of cables that crippled its IT systems. Although the airline said services were normalising by the end of the day, the incident raised questions about why backup systems had not been able to handle the outage.

The airline’s customers have already endured a summer of strikes and delays at Germany’s biggest airports, after labour unions pushed for better pay deals. The rolling strike disruptions compounded the difficult months that air passengers faced as travel demand recovered. The resurgence was greater than many airlines and airport operators had anticipated, resulting in long lines and misplaced baggage at airports from Dusseldorf to London’s Heathrow.

Lufthansa returned to a normal flight schedule on Thursday, offering only a short respite ahead of Friday’s planned strike, which is expected to hobble operations at major airports across Germany.

Earlier in the day, Frankfurt Airport said it expected the walkout to leave only emergency operations able to continue on Friday. More than one thousand take-offs and landings had been planned, but airlines would likely cancel most of the flights, it said. Normally, it would have served between 120,000 and 130,000 passengers that day.

Munich Airport said it had applied to the regional government to close commercial operations on Friday, with exceptions for emergencies and the ongoing Munich Security Conference. The strikes, however, are bound to complicate travel for delegates. There will be no regular passenger flights at the airport, with more than 700 departures and arrivals cancelled, a spokesperson said.

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The airport in Stuttgart also said no flights would be possible on Friday, while those in Hamburg, Hanover, Dortmund and Bremen warned that service would be disrupted. BLOOMBERG