Status: 23.12.2021 3:44 p.m.
Lufthansa will be removing around 33,000 flights from the winter plan in the coming weeks. The CEO points to falling booking numbers because of the Omikron variant. Sick pilots are also a burden for the airline.
Due to falling bookings and the aggravated corona situation, Lufthansa cancels tens of thousands of flights in winter. “From mid-January to February we see a sharp drop in bookings. In the winter flight schedule we have to cut around 10 percent in the group,” said Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. Specifically, it is about 33,000 flights.
According to the manager, the main reason for the massive cut is the lack of passengers from the Lufthansa Group’s home markets, i.e. Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium. Without the so-called slots, with which airlines secure their take-off and landing rights, Lufthansa would have canceled even more flights. “But we have to carry out 18,000 additional, unnecessary flights in winter just to secure our take-off and landing rights,” the manager criticized the EU rules for allocating slots.
Many pilots reported sick
In addition, Lufthansa is struggling with a high number of sickness reports from its pilots. The airline had to cancel intercontinental flights over the Christmas holidays. From December 23 to 26, the main focus will be on connections across the North Atlantic, for example to Boston, Houston and Washington, as a spokesman said. A total of six long-haul connections to the USA would have to be canceled by Sunday. 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’s not enough for the extremely high sickness rate,” said the spokesman. He did not want to speculate about a connection with the Corona variant Omikron, since the company was not informed about the type of diseases. First, the portal “aero.de” reported on the staff shortages, which can only be partially absorbed by pilots who jumped in spontaneously.
Looking for a replacement
Affected is the sub-fleet of long-haul Airbus A330 / A340 aircraft, for which replacement pilots are urgently needed 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.
Only recently, Europe’s largest airline 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.
Lufthansa is not alone with the shortage of personnel. The Scandinavian airline SAS also announced yesterday that it had to cancel flights due to an unusually high number of sick leave and due to the corona quarantine regulations. On Tuesday, 30 of around 600 connections were affected every day.
Shortage of pilots in the USA too
In the US, airlines are also struggling with a shortage of pilots. United Airlines recently announced that 100 planes would have to remain on the ground due to a lack of staff. 44 routes would be discontinued from Washington, it was said yesterday. Because the demand for travel collapsed during the Corona crisis and a full recovery in aviation is not expected until 2025 at the earliest, many airlines had fired pilots, temporarily released them or taken early retirement.
Lufthansa also wants to permanently reduce the fleet from 760 to 650 aircraft. Therefore, many personnel issues are still unanswered. Most recently, the airline announced an agreement with the pilots’ union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) for a fleet size of at least 325 aircraft. Tough negotiations about the future cost structure of the parent company have been going on for months. This should shrink in favor of more cost-effective platforms such as the holiday airline brand Eurowings Discover, which would save the group high-paying jobs at Lufthansa.
Short-time working regulations apply to the pilots until the end of March. For the time after that, Lufthansa has announced layoffs in the event that other models cannot be found, for example part-time. According to Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr, up to 1,000 full-time positions will have to be saved due to the pandemic. The union also stated that it for its part had terminated the collective wage agreement effective June 30, 2022. From summer onwards, strikes are theoretically possible again.
Industry hopes for 2022
In the meantime, Christmas air traffic in Europe has got underway. In particular, the companies Easyjet – with a plus of 41 percent compared to the previous week – and Wizz Air (plus 75 percent) significantly expanded their offerings in the last week of Advent, according to figures from the European aviation authority Eurocontrol. 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 one percent. Omikron also slows down the desire to travel.
For the coming year, however, the industry is relying on a relaxation of the Corona travel restrictions and thus a sharp increase in passenger numbers. The willingness of people to travel is still high, said the managing director of the German Airports Association (ADV), Ralph Beisel, on Tuesday. “We are convinced that the demand from private and business travelers will continue to increase as soon as travel restrictions fall.” Not all of the expectations of a recovery were fulfilled in the year that is drawing to a close. The airports had fewer than 80 million passengers, around a third of the pre-crisis level in 2019.
The airlines across Europe have not yet been able to work their way out of the deep: According to Eurocontrol data, the number of flights (passengers and freight) was 56 percent of the pre-crisis level of 2019. Lufthansa and its sister airlines cut with a minus of 60 percent and more compared to 2019, again weaker than many competitors. For the summer, the group is cautiously calculating with a capacity of 80 percent in the summer and 70 percent for the year as a whole.