Pilots’ 24-Hour Strike Grounds 65,000 Lufthansa Passengers

In a bad omen for a peak vacation season just getting started, Lufthansa pilots staged a 24-hour strike Thursday that left 65,000 passengers on the ground and cost Europe’s second-largest airline at least $23 million.

The second walkout in a week by the union representing the German national carrier’s 4,200 pilots ratcheted up the animosity level on both sides. The airline denounced the action as “irresponsible” and “excessive,” while the pilots declared success in forcing cancellation of at least 800 of the 1,100 scheduled flights.

Lufthansa spent heavily to mitigate the worst kind of publicity that can afflict a national carrier in a country with a brisk business trade and workers who enjoy a minimum six weeks of annual vacation. Full-page newspaper ads warned passengers of the potential for delays or cancellations, and ground crews were deployed to book stranded passengers on trains or rival airlines.

At Frankfurt, continental Europe’s busiest airport, marooned travelers waited for hours for alternative arrangements. However, the airline’s forewarning appeared to have kept tempers in check.

Deutsche Bahn, the national rail network, added cars to most inter-city runs to handle the overflow of passengers from flights that are usually packed with business travelers and vacationers headed off on long weekends. Though schools are still in session, May is a heavy travel month because of the run of religious holidays that gives Germans three long weekends between Easter and early June.

Lufthansa gave priority to getting as many of its long-haul flights off the ground as possible, finding nonunion pilots or joint flights with other airlines for about two-thirds of 49 distant destinations. By late afternoon, it also managed to get 80 flights within Germany and Europe off the ground.

The pilots are demanding immediate raises of between 30% and 35%, which they say would only put them on a par with European colleagues.

The airline’s last offer was for an average 10.6% raise now, with profit-sharing bonuses in the next three years that the employer forecast could raise senior pilots’ salaries by as much as 35% by the second year of the four-year pact they are seeking.

However, the United Cockpit union disputed those calculations in a letter to its members, contending that the airline had offered only a guaranteed 2% annual raise over basic pay after this year, exposing them to “the risk that it could fall to zero.”

United Cockpit rejected the offer Wednesday and began the 24-hour strike at midnight. The pilots, who held a half-day work stoppage last week, plan one-day actions every Thursday until their demands are met.

“This is a sign to Lufthansa that we must resume talks as soon as possible,” union spokesman Georg Fongern said in Frankfurt.

He appealed to the airline to return to the negotiating table with a fresh offer today and said further strikes were “unavoidable” unless an agreement is signed by next Wednesday.

Lufthansa management has warned that the strikes could destroy the airline’s operating profit, which fell in the first quarter of this year by about 5% from the same period in 2000.

The airline will be able to recover and match last year’s performance “only if we get an acceptable agreement with the trade union in a reasonable time,” Chief Financial Officer Karl-Ludwig Kley said last week.

Also affected by the pilots’ strike are Lufthansa subsidiaries Condor, a charter airline, and Lufthansa Cargo, an air freight service second only to FedEx in the European volume it moves.