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Crowds at Düsseldorf Airport: 200,000 passengers are expected here this weekend alone - but there is a lack of staff
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David Young / picture alliance / dpa
North Rhine-Westphalia was the first of the 16 German federal states to start the summer holidays this weekend.
At the airports in the most populous federal state, there were already chaotic scenes and crowds on Friday, with long queues forming at baggage check-in and in front of security checks.
Lufthansa believes that these conditions will not change anytime soon.
The airline does not expect flight operations to return to normal until next year.
"Unfortunately, we will hardly be able to realistically achieve a short-term improvement now in the summer," Lufthansa board member Detlef Kayser told the "Welt".
Currently only helping to reduce the number of flights.
This is not only a German problem, but applies to the whole world.
"We expect the situation to return to normal overall in 2023."
Lufthansa recently announced that it would cancel more than 2,000 more flights at its Frankfurt and Munich hubs, partly because more crews are reporting sick due to corona cases.
A good two weeks ago, she announced that she would be canceling 900 connections on Fridays and weekends in July.
The low-cost subsidiary Eurowings also expects further cuts.
However, the main reason for the failures is a lack of staff – both at the airports, for example at security checks, and at the airlines themselves.
7200 skilled workers are missing
It was clear very early on that staff shortages would be a problem in the aviation industry, Kayser told the newspaper.
Frankfurt Airport, for example, has invested heavily in recruitment.
But it has been recognized that staff cannot be built up as quickly as hoped, which is also due, for example, to the more stringent industry-specific security checks.
The industry is now hoping for rapid exemptions from German authorities for the deployment of around 2,000 Turkish workers.
The trade union Ver.di, on the other hand, justifies its current demand for significantly higher salaries with the search for urgently needed additional staff.
A study by the German Economic Institute (IW) identified a gap of around 7,200 skilled workers in aviation in Germany this week.
At the same time, there are "no longer any reserves on the labor market" to fill these vacancies for air and ground personnel - there is a particular lack of personnel on the ground.
In the meantime, Düsseldorf Airport alone is expecting more than 200,000 passengers on the first holiday weekend – a total of three million passengers during the holidays.
In the busiest times, almost as many passengers would be handled as before the corona pandemic, airport boss Thomas Schnalke reported this week.
After all: Lufthansa and Eurowings have announced that they will largely exclude the classic holiday routes from the cuts.
Above all, flights within Germany and Europe, for which there are alternative travel options by train, are to be eliminated.
apr/dpa
