flight chaos? Just ask the Scandinavians before you complain the next time: they had a double portion of it for two weeks – just in time for the start of the summer holidays. In addition to the corona-related shortage of staff and the resulting queues at the airports, the pilots of SAS, the largest airline in the north, had also been on strike for 15 days until Tuesday morning.
The result: 3,700 flights that were often canceled at short notice, 370,000 affected passengers and still hundreds of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians stuck somewhere far away. Trains and long-distance buses to the rest of the continent were also hopelessly fully booked as a result of the strike, and anyone looking for a relaxing holiday was best off on a bicycle.
On Tuesday morning the news: SAS is flying again with the entire fleet. Then when all the parked planes are ready, which can take up to two days. The news of the agreement between the pilots and the managers of Scandinavian Airlines was greeted with great relief, and the share rose immediately on the stock exchange, but it was not enough to cause great jubilation. The anger among customers is too great for that, and so is concern for the future of the ailing airline.
The strike was triggered by the handling of those pilots who had been laid off during the corona pandemic. When they were released, the SAS leadership had promised them they would be reinstated for the moment when they could be needed again. In view of the rapidly increasing number of passengers, the time had long come for this, and SAS actually offered the pilots new jobs: Not in the parent company, however, but in the newly founded subsidiaries SAS Link and SAS Connect, on new, worse terms. An attempt by management to cut costs – and a broken promise for the pilot associations of Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
The SAS boss apologized to the passengers
And when the chairman of the Danish Pilots’ Association, Henrik Thyregod, told TV2 on Tuesday morning that the negotiations had been “incredibly difficult”, but that he was “glad” that the planes could soon be getting airborne again, then that was it especially at this point of agreement: the management has promised to reinstate the 450 dismissed pilots in the parent company.
According to the Danish media, however, the pilots made considerable concessions for this victory. TV2 reported that the pilots had agreed to a pay cut of up to 25 percent and that the workload could be increased from the current 47 hours a week to 60 hours. The agreement applies to all of Scandinavia for the next five years.
SAS boss Anko van der Werff apologized to the passengers. The SAS of the past two weeks is “not the SAS we want to be”. The customers have been put off as well as the urgently sought potential investors. You will “work hard” to regain the lost trust.
That it won’t be that easy, that there probably won’t be any way back to the times when Scandinavian Airlines was a source of pride in the Nordic countries, showed a poll during the strike. A third of the Danes surveyed said with a shrug that they did not consider the survival of the airline to be particularly important – in contrast to their finance minister, Nicolai Wammen, who explained again last month how important SAS is, above all for the Danish economy and the aviation hub Copenhagen be.
Society is seen as outdated and sluggish
The Danish and Swedish states are still involved in SAS, but they no longer want to inject further billions into the airline, which has recently been heavily in deficit. The pandemic was just the final blow to the SAS. It has long been considered outdated, cumbersome and digitally backward, and the cheap competition made it difficult for the company. The boss Anko van der Werff, who comes from the Netherlands, therefore presented an ambitious restructuring and savings program last year. He wants to renegotiate the apparently overpriced contracts with the leasing companies and bring new investors on board.
A first step in reducing personnel costs has apparently been taken with Tuesday’s agreement. But now “much tougher negotiations” with creditors and potential investors were waiting, the newspaper wrote Jyllands Posten. “The pilots’ strike is over,” commented the conservative Berlingske. “The problems of SAS are far from it”.