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Above all, short flights in the late afternoon and evening should be taken out of the plan
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / dpa
Due to the tense situation in air traffic, Lufthansa has canceled further flights at its hubs in Frankfurt and Munich.
From this Friday up to and including Thursday next week (July 8-14), the flight schedule for the other connections is to be stabilized, said a company spokesman.
The exact number of deletions has not yet been determined.
In particular, short flights in the late afternoon and evening would be canceled as the planes accumulated more and more delay minutes throughout the day.
Lufthansa had previously canceled more than 3,000 flights in two waves for the months of July and August.
At Frankfurt Airport in particular, there are bottlenecks in the ground handling of aircraft due to a lack of staff, which is increasingly affecting the freight subsidiary Lufthansa Cargo.
The subsidiary confirmed that four cargo flights have been relocated to Munich for the weekend.
However, the ban on the transport of live animals on board that has been in place in the meantime is to be lifted again.
»Now we have to get the mess under control«
In the meantime, the head of the Lufthansa supervisory board has called on the employees to tackle the existing handling and service problems together.
"Now we have to get the mess under control," said Karl-Ludwig Kley in an interview published on the Lufthansa intranet after a special meeting of the supervisory board.
Kley spoke out against mutually offsetting the mistakes made.
»In the interests of the whole (...) I can only appeal to everyone involved to find pragmatic and short-term solutions.
We can then talk about the fundamentals again when the turning point has settled in.«
The special meeting of the control body had been requested by the employee representatives.
Union representatives and works councils in the area had sharply criticized the management board's crisis management.
Employees were threatened with layoffs long after the higher demand for flights had become apparent.
Kley admitted mistakes in the personnel strategy and showed understanding for the high stress that the staff is exposed to due to the numerous delays and flight cancellations.
The head of the supervisory board described the problems in air traffic as diverse and also industry-wide.
This was also recognized at the meeting.
Kley said: "One day the worldwide reservation system is down, the next day French airspace is closed.
And everything always comes on top.
There is no magic formula for this, just hard work in the details.«
Meanwhile, the service providers for passenger and baggage screening are preparing measures to defuse the situation at the airports.
They want to hire more staff because of the current flight chaos.
"We have between 90 and 95 percent of the staff that we had on board at the end of 2019 on board again," said Udo Hansen, President of the Federal Association of Aviation Security Companies.
That is basically enough staff given that traffic is still around 70 percent of the pre-corona level.
However, the industry is trying very hard to achieve 100 percent staffing again.
But the search and training took several months.
Because the number of passengers has risen sharply, there have been repeated difficulties at the airports in recent weeks.
Despite the favorable numbers in the aviation security check, things can get stuck in one place or another on peak days, said Hansen.
At an average of 20 percent, sick leave is twice as high as usual.
"We're not responsible for congestion at airports," said Hansen.
The number of staff is based on tenders from the Federal Police.
Only for 10 to 15 peak days a year were control lanes and personnel insufficient.
However, the number of lanes on a motorway should not be based on a few peak days.
hey/dpa