On Europe's largest budget airline Ryanair and its passengers, the next wave of strikes is rolling. Crews from six different European countries want to resign from work all day on Friday - the relevant unions announced. Also, the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) has called the pilots and Ver.di the flight attendants at all German sites to strike.
Nevertheless, Ryanair canceled until Thursday afternoon only for the 200 flights from the program with more than 2400 connections. The vast majority of employees will take up their duties, they said. Already on Wednesday Ryanair had canceled for Europe 150 flights on Friday. This number increased again by 35 to 45 deletions, because in the short term the VC had announced their participation in the strike. That would be only about 10 percent of the program planned for Germany with about 400 connections.
Later, Ryanair announced via Twitter that they had canceled because of the VC strike "under 100" flights. A strike list was not published again, but affected passengers should be individually informed. The Ryanair stake Laudamotion said Friday for eight Germany flights.
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The Vereinigung Cockpit doubted that it would come to only minor impact on air traffic: "There will be significantly more than 35 flights fail," said VC spokesman Janis Schmitt. In the last strike of the pilots Ryanair had canceled in Germany 150 out of 400 flights.
Ryanair risked air traffic chaos with the cancellation of just a few flights, warned the Belgian union CNE in Brussels. "By not canceling enough flights in view of tomorrow's strike, Ryanair behaves irresponsibly and risks tension and uncertainty for airport staff, employees and passengers." At Charleroi airport, for example, about 20,000 expected passengers are in trouble.
The largest Ryanair base in Germany is Frankfurt Airport. There, Ver.di is planning a rally on Friday - as in Berlin-Schönefeld - to which colleagues from other locations are also to come. In Frankfurt, all 22 scheduled Ryanair departures were still valid on Thursday afternoon.