The airline industry has been battered since the start of the coronavirus pandemic
Frankfurt:
Germany’s flag carrier Lufthansa will cut its winter flight plan by “about 10 percent” as the proliferation of its Omicron variant fuels uncertainty over travel, CEO Carsten Spohr said on Thursday.
“From mid-January to February, we’re seeing a sharp drop in bookings,” causing the airline group to cancel “33,000 flights or about 10 percent” of its flights this winter, Spohr said in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS).
“Most importantly, we are missing passengers in our home markets of Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium, as these countries have been hit hardest by the pandemic wave,” Spohr said.
Europe’s largest airline group – which includes Eurowings, Austrian, Swiss and Brussels Airlines – currently operated “about 60 percent” of flights compared to the pre-pandemic year 2019, carrying “about half” the number of passengers, it said. the CEO .
The number of cancellations would have been higher had the group not performed 18,000 “additional, unnecessary flights to secure our landing and take-off rights,” Spohr said.
The airline industry has been battered since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, with numerous flights grounded in 2020 as countries closed their borders.
The European airport association ACI Europe estimated on Thursday that the number of passengers traveling through its members has fallen by 20 percent since November 24, when the Omicron variant was first reported to the World Health Organization.
Germany has imposed stricter limits on travelers from countries including the United Kingdom and South Africa, where the new variant has caused a wave of cases.
Sudden headwinds for the industry also caused Irish low-cost airline Ryanair to cut its January schedule by 33 percent this week.
Across the Atlantic, American Airlines said it averaged more than 5,000 flights per day during the Christmas and New Year period — about 86 percent of its schedule over the same period in 2019.
Domestic demand “is very strong,” the company said.
Internationally, pandemic-related travel restrictions or testing requirements are having a “dampening effect” on demand, it added, “and we’ve seen that in some places.”
sick pilots
On Thursday, a Lufthansa spokesperson told AFP that the airline had already canceled several transatlantic flights around Christmas after the number of pilots who called in sick exceeded normal for this time of year.
When asked whether the absences were related to the Omicron variant, the spokesperson said he “couldn’t speculate” because he had no information about the causes of disease.
In total, the airline had to cancel six flights between December 23 and 26, including flights to Chicago, Boston and Washington.
The lack of personnel came despite Lufthansa’s “large planned reserves” of crew, the spokesman said.
Sweden’s flag carrier SAS also canceled nine flights on Wednesday due to the coronavirus, after canceling some 30 flights worldwide the day before.
Lufthansa posted its first operating profit since the start of the pandemic in the third quarter of this year, after a difficult 18 months.
The airline posted an underlying or operating loss of 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) in 2020 and turned to the state for support.
In November, Lufthansa announced that it had finished paying back the €9 billion it had received from the government ahead of schedule.
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