Iberia Cancels Flights

The second strike action in less than a month by the cabin employees at Iberia, Spain’s flagship airline, has forced the carrier to cancel a series of flights on both Tuesday November 10 and Wednesday the 11th.

The cabin crew unions’ CTA and SITCPLA have called the move due to a pay dispute. October 26 and 27 saw the previous strikes being carried out.

Amongst the flights affected, are the very busy Madrid to London connections, along with the Madrid to Brussels, Paris, Sao Paulo and New York connections. Iberia had to cancel more than 360 flights in total during the two-day strike.

Iberia released a statement earlier saying that these flights had to be cancelled since the carrier couldn’t provide the level of service required by Spanish authorities. It apologised for the inconveniences caused to its customers and promised to do everything to alleviate them.

It added that it had been trying to avoid this situation which it described as an ‘unjustified strike’ and had called on the unions to cancel the strike action.

Flights operated by Iberia Regional, Vueling or Air Nostrum in behalf of Iberia with the codes IB5000, IB8000 and IB7000 are not affected by the strikes as well as Canary Islands and Balearic Islands flights.

The strikes were planned after Iberia announced that it was proposing a new strategy to deal with poor demand, declining revenues and increasing losses. The carrier revealed that it had experienced a drop in revenue of 18% during the first six months of the year.

According to Iberia chief operating officer Rafael Sánchez-Lozano, the carrier cannot sustain this situation much longer.

The airline’s plan include early retirement for all members of the cabin staff aged over 55, a hiring freeze, a company wide salary freeze for 2011 and 2012 and laying off about 200 of its ground staff.

Iberia’s stance is similar to several important carriers around the world. British Airways has been exposed with the identical problem particularly with its cabin staff. The airline said it had to reduce the number of cabin crew on each flight, freeze pay and stop hiring in order to deal will lower demand and the dire economic environment. BA officials said that these were the worst economic conditions it had to endure in all its years of existence.