- Lufthansa’s Dublin flights to Germany cancelled for 3rd successive day
- LH983@05:30, LH979@12:25, LH2515@17:35 and LH981@17:55
- Union says long haul flights on Saturday impacted
Lufthansa pilots union Vereinigung Cockpit has extended its strike to affect short haul flights on Friday and long haul flights on Saturday.
The cancellations outbound from Dublin to Germany on Friday are LH983@05:30 to Frankfurt, LH979@12:25 to Frankfurt, LH2515@17:35 to Munich and LH981@17:55 to Frankfurt.
Lufthansa has already grounded 1,800 flights since Wednesday, disrupting travel plans for 315,000 passengers, including 1,700 from Ireland. The casualties included the German airline’s entire schedule between Dublin, Munich and Frankfurt, twelve flights in each direction.
It is the 14th strike to hit the airline in its long-running pay row with the pilots’ union. The union wants an average annual pay increase of 3.7pc a five-year period from 2012. Lufthansa has offered 2.5pc over six years to 2019. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr that the airline’s future would be on the line if pilots’ wages were raised by that amount.
Lufthansa said most long-haul flights will be unaffected on Friday with 830 flights lost, just over a quarter of its schedule, hitting more than 100,000 passengers. The union said all long-haul flights leaving Germany until midnight on Saturday would be affected
Harry Hohmeister, a Lufthansa board member, told Reuters that cancellations for the first two days of strike action had cost the airline about €20m and customers were making fewer bookings:”not only have we suffered severe damage (from the strike), but we’re also noticing from mid-term booking numbers that customer behaviour is changing,”
IW Cologne Institute for Economic Research said that 2015 walkouts by pilots and cabin crew cost Lufthansa €231m, or €30m per day.
Flights by Lufthansa’s other airlines including Germanwings, Eurowings, Austrian Airlines, SWISS and Brussels Airlines, are not affected by this strike but public-sector union Verdi announced Monday there would be a 24-hour strike on Tuesday by cabin crews at Lufthansa’s no-frills airline Eurowings.
Alll 23 Eurowings aircraft at Düsseldorf and Hamburg airports would be affected.
