Germany’s largest airports warn of closures on Friday amid strikes
GERMANY’S airports will come to a near standstill on Friday, adding to a week of chaos after snapped fiber cables grounded Deutsche Lufthansa AG’S fleet.
A one-day walkout called by the labor union Verdi will hobble operations at seven airports across Germany, including the country’s largest in Frankfurt and Munich, the airports said late on Wednesday. Smaller airports in five other German cities will also be affected.
The warning strikes come amid slow progress in talks over pay and conditions for security and other ground staff. Verdi is seeking a significant boost to wages for workers hit by higher energy prices and record inflation.
Frankfurt and Munich are both Lufthansa hubs, and the cancellations are another blow to the airline that saw widespread disruptions Wednesday. Workers had accidentally drilled through four cables buried some 16 feet below ground in a suburb close to the Frankfurt airport, bringing down the carrier’s IT systems and grounding hundreds of flights worldwide.
Though Lufthansa said services were normalizing by late Wednesday, the incident raised questions about why backup systems hadn’t been able to handle the outage. The airline is conducting an internal investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s largest, expects the walkout to leave only emergency operations able to continue on Friday, a spokesperson said. More than 1,000 starts and landings had been planned, and the airport would normally have served between 120,000 and 130,000 passengers that day. Airlines will likely cancel most flights, they said.
Munich Airport said it had applied to the regional government to close commercial operations on Friday, with exceptions for emergencies and the ongoing Munich Security Conference. The strikes, however, are bound to complicate travel for delegates attending the annual gathering of defense and foreign policy makers. There will be no regular passenger flights at the airport, with more than 700 departures and arrivals canceled, a spokesperson said.
The Stuttgart airport also said no flights would be possible on Friday, while Hamburg, Hannover, Dortmund and Bremen warned that service would be disrupted.