Lufthansa is again canceling flights at its hubs in Frankfurt and Munich. From this Friday up to and including Thursday next week (July 8-14), the flight schedule for the other connections is to be stabilized, a company spokesman said on Thursday.
The exact number of deletions has not yet been determined. In particular, short flights in the late afternoon and evening would be canceled as the planes accumulated more and more delay minutes throughout the day. Lufthansa had previously canceled more than 3,000 flights in two waves for the months of July and August.
At Frankfurt Airport in particular, there are bottlenecks in the ground handling of aircraft due to a lack of staff, which is increasingly affecting the freight subsidiary Lufthansa Cargo. The subsidiary confirmed that four cargo flights have been relocated to Munich for the weekend. However, the ban on the transport of live animals on board that has been in place in the meantime is to be lifted again.
Although the flight chaos continues unchecked, the ground handling service providers only want to hire about half of the announced temporary workers from Turkey. The companies had requested fewer than 1,000 helpers, said the head of the employers’ association ABL, Thomas Richter.
Politicians in the Bundestag called for permanent solutions. The Union called on the government to immediately convene an “air travel summit” with the responsible ministers. A corresponding application was rejected in the Bundestag. The left-wing politician Pascal Meiser called on the airlines in particular to take action. He spoke of an ailing system with miserable working conditions.
When it came to the question of temporary workers, after talks with three federal ministries, there was always talk of a need for around 2,000 people. They should be recruited as quickly as possible at German tariff conditions, especially in Turkey, in order to alleviate the chaos at German airports. After the negotiations, the employment agency refrained from checking whether German employees were available for the jobs. However, the security checks by the state authorities remain in place.
During the actual implementation of the campaign, it turned out that some of the companies had imagined higher requirement profiles, said ABL association leader Richter. It was clear from the beginning that it could only be about “helping hands”, for example with luggage loading. The support also comes too late for some providers. Although he expects the first missions as early as August, the Frankfurt airport operator Fraport has so far assumed September.
The airport association ADV had announced that the larger providers had registered their needs, without giving figures for individual locations. This does not include the service provider Wisag, which offers ground handling services in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Münster and Leipzig. “We are well positioned for our customers in terms of organization and personnel, provided that there are no short-term strong waves of illness,” said a spokeswoman.