Status: 02/16/2023 5:57 p.m
The airline plans to cancel 34,000 flights in the summer months. The reason for this is the blatant shortage of staff in the group. And the number could even increase if there are cuts at subsidiaries like Eurowings.
According to a media report, Lufthansa is significantly reducing its range of flights in the summer due to a persistent shortage of staff. The core brand Lufthansa is canceling around 34,000 flights in the summer half-year – and thus around ten percent of the flight schedule currently offered.
“Lufthansa has adjusted the 2023 summer flight schedule from Frankfurt and Munich,” said a group spokesman for “Wirtschaftswoche”. Up to 500 flights per day will then be eliminated. The main reason is that the entire industry “continues to suffer from bottlenecks and staff shortages, especially in Europe”.
Flight cancellations for stability
There are problems at airports, ground handling services and air traffic control as well as the airlines themselves. The canceled flights should reduce the workload and “enable more stability for the whole system,” the Lufthansa spokesman told the magazine.
The numbers are not yet exact, “because further daily deletions can always be added,” said the spokesman. The magazine reported, citing insiders, that there could also be flight cancellations at the subsidiary airlines Eurowings and Swiss. Lufthansa could not initially be reached for comment.
20,000 new employees by the end of 2023
During the Corona crisis, almost 30,000 people were laid off by the group, and the German state had to save the airline from bankruptcy with billions in loans. The desire to travel has returned with the lifting of many corona restrictions, business is booming – and the laid-off employees are missing. The group has paid back the state aid. In December, the airline raised its forecast for operating profit in 2022 to 1.5 billion euros. The company will present the figures for the 2022 financial year on March 3.
Last November, the German airline announced a major hiring offensive to get the staffing problem under control. Lufthansa and its subsidiary Eurowings plan to hire 20,000 new employees by the end of 2023.
Chaos summer 2022 also in 2023?
The shortage of personnel runs through many areas in aviation. Thousands of workers were missing at German airports during the surprisingly steep restart last summer. Last year, the airline had to scale back the summer flight schedule because the increase in personnel in air traffic was not expected to keep pace with the strong recovery in travel demand. The group canceled almost 7,000 flights to stabilize the system.
The flight of many employees from the airport to other jobs was one of the reasons for the chaos in handling with long waiting times and delays last summer, which ultimately could only be managed with fewer flights. The trade union ver.di has already warned that the shortage of staff has not yet been resolved. She calls for better pay in collective bargaining so that more workers can be recruited.