Despite pilots strike a Lufthansa Cargo MD-11 moved 65 tons
of relief supplies to Haiti Monday from DUS via Lufthansa Cargo
Charter Agency.
|
Lufthansa Cargo is only modestly affected
by the four day scheduled walkout of roughly 4,000 Lufthansa pilots
that commenced midnight February 21.
"Roughly 85 percent of our freighter flights
will be operated according to schedule” said LH Cargo's head of
communications, Nils Haupt.
As things stand at this hour only three
MD-11 freighter flights will have to be cancelled.
Today Frankfurt-Bangalore-Chennai and
Frankfurt-Krasnoyarsk-Incheon were scrapped, followed by Frankfurt-Sharjah-Hong
Kong next Thursday.
The impact is modest due to the hiring
of external capacity and cockpit crews.
"Our subsidiary Lufthansa Cargo Charter
Agency chartered more than three widebody freighters from European and
U.S. providers," Herr Haupt stated.
In addition AeroLogic GmbH, a DHL Express
and LH Cargo joint venture, conducted one flight on behalf of LH Cargo
due to urgent capacity demand.
As a consequence of these capacity management
decisions two additional flights with chartered freighters from Frankfurt
to New York (JFK) tomorrow (Tu) and Thursday will be operated.
Haupt, however admits that the strike
cripples the transport of air freight in the belly-hold compartments
of Lufthansa's passenger fleet.
To avoid major disruptions, all shipments
within Germany are entirely trucked. This applies for most tonnage that
is moved within Europe, too.
Only special goods like pharmaceuticals,
express shipments or perishables are flown on board Lufthansa's passenger
aircraft to and from airports in the EU.
A number of intercontinental routes however,
are causing the management some headache since passenger aircraft serve
those routes exclusively.
This applies for Vancouver, Lima and Cairo
for instance.
"There, we are facing some challenges
this week if these flights are cancelled due to the strike," Haupt
said.
Lufthansa's well-paid German pilots started
their walkout last night forcing the carrier to cancel hundreds of flights.
Thousands of passengers were stranded and had to rebook their flights
on other airlines or board trains for domestic travel.
The LH management expects the four-day,
nonstop strike—the longest in the history of the airline, to cost
the airline about €100 million euros.
About two thirds of all passenger flights
will have to be cancelled.
With this action, the pilot union Vereinigung
Cockpit (VC) is trying to extend their influence to control parts of
the company's business strategy.
This has been strongly rejected by the
carrier's executive board.
Lufthansa Captains earn between €110,000
and 250,000 euros per year. The maximum is approximately the same pay
Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel gets.
Heiner Siegmund |
Air
Cargo News FlyingTypers leads the way again as the world’s first air
cargo publication to connect the industry to the broadly expanding and
interactive base for social commentary—Twitter.
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without misplacing a copy.
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