Germany: 2,340 Flights Cancelled Due to Strike Affecting Nearly 300,000 Passengers

Germany's air travel has essentially stopped due to collective bargaining strikes by public sector workers, ground crew, and flight control at seven airports. The German Airports Association (ADV) announced that nearly 300,000 passengers would be affected by the cancellation of 2,340 flights and urged that " solutions must be found at the negotiating table and not on the backs of passengers," according to Xinhua news agency. Lufthansa, the national airline of Germany, had to cancel more than 1,300 flights on its own. On Friday, there are absolutely no departures from Frankfurt or Munich.

"There is still a catastrophic labor shortage among ground handling workers -- travellers clearly felt that last summer," Christine Behle, deputy chairwoman of the trade union Verdi, said on Wednesday when announcing the strikes. "To change this situation, they must be given an attractive wage increase."

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Staff shortages caused by job cuts during the pandemic and various strike actions affected Europe`s entire aviation industry last summer and led to an international travel chaos with thousands of cancellations. At many airports, queues reached lengths of a kilometer or more.

As air traffic is recovering from the pandemic, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) warned that this summer could get even worse. "2023 will pose the biggest challenge in terms of coping with capacity issues and keeping delays down that the network has faced in over a decade," Director General Eamonn Brennan said.

It was not a good week for German air travelers. On Wednesday, a company-wide information technology outage at Lufthansa caused by damaged fiber optic cables during road construction work already led to numerous flight cancellations.

With IANS Inputs