A lone passenger outside security controls at Helsinki Airport on Monday, 9 December 2024. Finnair has cancelled roughly 300 flights this week due to two one-day pilot strikes. A spokesperson at the majority state-owned airline said yesterday further cancellations are possible because of supplementary industrial actions instituted by the Finnish Airline Pilots’ Association (SLL). (Jussi Nukari – Lehtikuva)
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FINNAIR has cancelled roughly 150 flights scheduled for today due to a strike organised by the Finnish Airline Pilots’ Association (SLL).
SLL in November announced that its pilots will take part in two one-day strikes on 9 and 13 December, prompting the majority state-owned airline to issue a warning of altogether 300 cancellations with impacts on around 33,000 passengers.
Mari Kanerva, the director of communications at Finnair, told Helsingin Sanomat on Thursday that additional cancellations are expected because the union also instituted a ban on standby duties, making the airline vulnerable to sickness-related absences. The cancellations, she cautioned, can occur at a very short notice.
“The flu season is underway, so [that] can lead to some individual cancellations. It’s difficult to provide any kind of estimates of how many individual cancellations there’ll be,” she commented to the newspaper.
Yesterday the standby ban forced the airline to cancel flights to Dallas, Doha, New York ant Tokyo. The airline has pledged to offer re-routing to all of the roughly 1,800 affected passengers, as well as organise accommodation for anyone who could not be re-routed until the following day.
Kanerva said passengers will be notified of the cancellations by e-mail or text message. Passengers will also be contacted directly as soon as suitable re-routing has been found.
SLL will go ahead with the strike after rejecting a proposal from the national conciliator to settle its labour dispute with Public Sector Employers (Palta) on Wednesday. As the union has refrained from setting an end date for the standby ban, the dispute is expected to continue disrupting air travel into the weekend.
The labour market organisations will return to the negotiating table on Friday. “We’re hoping that a solution is found as quickly as possible,” said Kanerva.
SLL has also instituted an overtime ban, further complicating the operations of Finnair.
A Finavia spokesperson told Helsingin Sanomat yesterday that at the moment the re-routings are not expected to cause congestions at security controls at Helsinki Airport.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
