Disruption continues for Qantas

Qantas passengers are facing their third day this week of severe disruptions to travel plans with a strike today by licensed engineers’ union to affect over 7,600 passengers from 17 flight cancellations and 32 flight delays.

Rugby fans travelling from Sydney to New Zealand for the World Cup semi-final could face delays of more than three hours, the airline warned.

The strike, which will take place between 4pm-8pm in Sydney, comes after the Australian Licenced Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) on Monday cancelled a strike just hours before it was to commence, causing chaos to the travel plans of 11,000 people.

Strikes yesterday by the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and the strike today from the ALAEA will bring the total number of passengers impacted since unions started action to around 60,000.

The misery for passengers has been compounded by Customs workers walking off the job for one hour at Sydney from 7am (AEDT), again at 9am (AEDT) and for two hours at 7pm (AEDT).

Customs workers at Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, the Gold Coast and Cairns held similar stoppages through the day.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said: “We now have the pilots' union, the licensed aircraft maintenance engineers union and the Transport Workers’ Union all ramping up their coordinated industrial campaign against Qantas.

“They want to be paid to do work that no longer exists due to the advent of new aircraft.

“They want to retain outdated work practices. They want to tell us what we can and can’t change.

“Effectively they are trying to dictate how we run Qantas – whether it is the pilots’ union demanding the right to dictate pilot pay rates in Jetstar, or the licensed engineers demanding a veto on the modernisation of work practices, or the TWU wanting to limit our use of contractors.”

Qantas is taking five aircraft out of service – resulting in a reduction of 97 flights per week – as a result of continuing industrial action by its maintenance engineers.

Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne will bear the brunt of the cuts.

Joyce said the aircraft groundings were necessary because go-slows and overtime bans by maintenance engineers meant there was a shortfall in maintenance capacity of over 1,200 hours per week, or about eight percent.

“Regrettably, the industrial action from the licensed aircraft maintenance engineers’ union is now making it difficult to clear maintenance tasks in a timely fashion,” Joyce said.

“This means a number of aircraft are not available each day which has caused a decline in schedule reliability. On-time performance has fallen from 87% four weeks ago to 77% today.

“This is not a safety concern as problems are addressed before planes fly. But it is causing ongoing and unplanned disruption to our customers,” Joyce added.

Qantas said the measure would have no impact on QantasLink, Jetconnect and Jetstar.

by TravelMole Asia