Deutsche Lufthansa AG yesterday canceled hundreds of scheduled flights and will also be forced to ground airplanes today as its pilots plan a 48-hour walkout, the latest threat of disruption to its operations in a long-running pay dispute.
The pilots’ union said in a statement that all of Lufthansa’s short and long-haul flights out of Germany would be affected by the continued action, planned to run until 11:59pm today.
The strike is the 14th to hit the airline in its row with the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) union, and the airline said that it has canceled 876 of about 3,000 flights scheduled for yesterday, affecting about 100,000 passengers.
Lufthansa late on Tuesday sought to prevent the strike from going ahead after a Frankfurt labor court earlier rejected its application for an injunction.
However, a judge at the Hesse state labor court rejected the company’s appeal and said the strike may go ahead, adding that the labor dispute was too complex to be properly dealt with in the form of an expedited injunction.
The union announced today’s strikes immediately after the verdict.
The strike was scheduled to begin at midnight yesterday and affect short and long-haul flights departing from German airports.
Flights by Lufthansa’s other airlines, including Germanwings GmbH, Eurowings GmbH, Austrian Airlines AG, Swiss International Air Lines AG and Brussels Airlines, are not affected by the pilots’ strike, Lufthansa said.
Austrian and Swiss are checking whether they can use larger aircraft to increase the number of passengers they can take.
For example, the group plans to use a wide-body Boeing 777 on the Vienna-Frankfurt route, it said.
However, budget airline Eurowings on Tuesday canceled about 60 flights due to a strike by some cabin crew in a separate pay dispute between management and the Verdi labor union.
Talks between Lufthansa and VC broke down this month, and the pilots have rejected calls by Lufthansa for the dispute to be taken to a mediator.
The union is calling for an average wage increase of 3.7 percent for 5,400 pilots in Germany over a five-year period dating back to 2012.
However, Lufthansa, which is trying to cut costs to cope with increased competition from low-cost carriers and leaner Persian Gulf rivals, has offered a 2.5 percent increase over the six years until 2019.
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