big statement. any facts to back up your comments?

It seems the employees of TUIfly in Germany are not thrilled either, about the way things are developing. There are rumours that their unhappiness about potentially being placed into a new company together with the holiday charter parts of Air Berlin has led to such an increase in sickness that 20 aircraft had to be subchartered to cover the program. Management has tried to calm things down with assurances that basing and terms and conditions will not be changes as a result. Presumably there could be implications for other TUI group companies?

well if TUIfly Germany is "seperated" from the rest of the TUI airlines there will be a significant dis-synergy for them, so assume what will actually happen is lots of things for the TUI airlines will be done in conjunction with Etihad and their other joint ventures (Air Serbia, Jet Airways, Alitalia, Virgin Australia, Air Seychelles) sounds messy and even more complex

Apparently 22 out of 29 TUIfly aircraft not operating at the moment - not sure how many of the 14 aircraft opf airberlin are grounded as well, but the airberlin has seen more cancellations than X3 proper, so probably quite a few. Wonder how long airberlin will watch the spectacle before they try to happily walk away from their contract with X3 due to breach of contract.

The illegal industrial action (personnel taking part can be sued for all damages) aims directly at the air berlin operation. Crews report for duty, brief, go on board an airberlin painted TUI aircraft and then one of them calls in sick. That is how they did it the last two days. None of the TUI wetleases is currently operated by TUI.

Denti, that is utter bs. All employees are effected by the restructuring plan concerning TUI fly. The company will be transfered to Niki in Austria, adopting their collective work agreement. All ground jobs in HAJ will be lost. Basically we are talking about a bad bank, the new company will go bust in two, three years, there goes the pension plan. Not talking about the pay cut which is about 60% on the pilots side and not much better in the cabin. So don't tell me you would be ok to go to work the next day when you see yoursef in front of a huge disaster, just to raise TUI's earning by another 2%.:\

Well, could you substantiate that with facts? The only ones i have read are that a new holding, yes, with Niki, will be build in austria that holds several new companies, one of them TUIfly which will (for the time being at least) remain in HAJ and germany under german laws. Niki does not have anything in terms of administration, operation departments and so on and has to buy that from a third party, currently airberlin, in the future most probably TUIfly as the remaining parts of airberlin won't have anything to do with the new Niki/TUI company.

However, yes, there is a targeted action against the airberlin wet lease planes, which directly risks all jobs at airberlin and of course all jobs on those 14 planes as well.

And yes, i would go to work and let my company and works council negotiate, which could of course end in legal industrial action. Not undermining them and their standing, portraying them as helpless puppet actors as the TUI personnel currently does.

No, there is no targeted action against AB wet lease. The health problem does affect every AC being operated by TUIfly. To be honest, nobody really cares now about AB, they seem to be the winnwr of the game.
Do you happen to know about the social benefits of TUIfly? Now what do you think is the best solution to get rid of these obligations? The last thing they want to do is integrating another company into that welfare system. Niki will receive an OCC, CC and all the rest with young and cheap new hires and the guys in HAJ can choose to take the new contract or be layed off. Same for the flying stuff.

none of this is really new is it?

the bigger question I believe is whether we as a society accept that we need to compete at the lowest cheapest level or not.

Because if we are going to accept every industry being broken down in order to reduce terms and conditions then we have to at some point accept the same is going to happen to our public services, schools, health care..everything.

It may be cool to claim some sections of the industry earn too much and try to blame them for the airlines difficulties as some have done but airlines don't lose money because of high wages.

Airlines lose money because of bad business decisions. Society as it stands however accepts the cutting of terms and conditions of the innocent to further feather the nest of those whose bad decisions caused the mess in the first place.

BCAR Section L : Well said and absolutely spot on !

To me it looks like the US and the UK are already going that way. I've heard plenty of complaints from NHS employees (some of whom are moving to better countries), and that seems to be my impression of school employees in the UK (based on some media reports). I've seen some similar reports from US teachers - the medical system there has a completely different model so isn't really comparable though.

Then those smaller countries who are going in the opposite direction get criticised for being too socialistic or having high living expenses. (But there's a lot less poverty and everything works better so feel free to make your own conclusions...)

Agree totally with BCAR!

TUI flight crew in Germany are using the regulations regarding sickness to carry out a classic work to rule. If as has been reported, all the crews operating on behalf of Air Berlin report for work and then someone goes sick on every flight just before departure, then the message is pretty clear. The crew are very unhappy about what is going on and more than a little blame is down to poor communication from management.

Denti is much better informed about what you can and cannot do in Germany and I would be interested in his view. The crews are not complaining about their current conditions, but about what might happen in future. I am unclear what basis the union could ballot its members to strike in this case. It seems highly likely that there would be a vote for a a 'legal' strike, but on what basis?

The irony is that Air Berlin is locked into an expensive deal to wet lease 14 aircraft from TUI until 2019. If TUI cannot meet their obligations then Air Berlin might be able to get out of the deal, which of course would reduce jobs at TUI. If management cannot get control of the situation anything could happen.

The current escalation does look dangerous for the long term lease deal with (and said to be unwanted by) airberlin. AB might find a way to cancel it on short notice if TUI is not able to deliver.

Well, the LBA (german CAA) stepped in and forced TUI to stop all flying on their own AOC tomorrow. There will be apparently 10 flights operated by sub charters, none of their own aircraft is allowed to fly.

really, on what basis did the regulator ground them?

Officially TUI decided on its own to shut down their flight operation. However, behind the scenes the regulator was worried as key departments were not able to do their job anymore, including flight operation, netowrk control, the company effectively lost all oversight of its flight operation.

This all has the potential to get very expensive for TUI. They are claiming force majeure on the flight cancellations. If it was an official strike that would be so. With a work to rule it is less clear. Fifteen thousand passengers a day times 250 euros is a lot of money, not likely of course to be all claimed, but still a big issue. There are all the subcontracted aircraft, apparently over 20 yesterday. So the loss to TUI could be enormous, never mind the damage to the brand. If the deal falls apart and Air Berlin cancel the wet lease that is also a lot of money. If I was a director of TUI I would be very concerned.

AB needs the deal with TUI, don't think that they are in the position to cancel the wetlease. But yes, this story will be really expensive for TUI. School Holidays just starting, I assume a lot of TUI customers are really pixxxx .....

And TUIFly announced they are cancelling all their flights tomorrow( Friday ).
This is the start of the school holidays in some parts of Germany. Plus lot of stranded pax waiting to return. Expensive + big mess ahead .

Regarding the compensation TUI claims an "act of nature out of control". Let's see if the court agrees

Ironically the TUI share price was one of the best performers on the stock exchange. Either investors are completely out of touch with what is going on in Germany or perhaps more alarmingly they think that ultimately cutting cost is worth a bit of disruption. My sympathy is with the passengers.

Can anyone confirm, with 100% guaranteed fact, that the TUI AOC issue is limited to Germany and will not affect any other of the TUI group.

100% guaranteed fact AOC covers Germany only.
Thomson UK CAA
Arkefly Dutch NAA etc. etc.

Thank you as I have a ticket outside ze father-land.

Lots of delays and cancellations with AB at the moment. Got family traveling on AB later this month. Any idea on how long these disruptions are going to continue?

Main reason is still the fallout from the TUI guys feeling too much under the weather by a bit of news. Wonder what those little girls do in a real emergency?

Since a third of their fleet is working in airberlin livery under airberlin callsigns as TUI doesn't have enough business for them, that really disrupts airberlins schedule at the moment. It should work itself out in the next few days though.

Latest figures reported by Air Berlin show they lost 781.9 million euros in 2016 and including the last three months have burned through over a billion in the last 15 months.

300 mio euro loss in first quarter of this year, that's more than 3 million a day!
Maybe they can break the billion per year this year...

I find it interesting that there is such fascination in a pakistani captain taking a rest break in the cabin and yet the crisis at one of the world's largest airlines, Air Berlin, incidentally a british PLC, is almost completely ignored.

Air Berlin appears to be in complete chaos, with rumours that almost the entire flight program is disrupted. The boss of a major shareholder in the middle east, following the visit to the region of Mrs Merkel and the boss of Lufthansa Carsten Spohr last week, is reported as having been replaced. It is suggested that Lufthansa will most likely take them over.

Is there no interest in what seems like a huge issue effecting thousands of staff?

Sadly for their employees, airlines go bust every day. I think the main academic interest in Air Berlin would be as to why it has been allowed to stagger on with such prodigious losses for so long instead of folding earlier. How many possible start-ups has it deterred or prevented whilst dragging itself along zombie-like? Not good for the market or for long-term employment.

Yes, but if it was Monarch (as indeed it was last year) PPRuNe would be all over it. Perhaps the site is just too UK-centric.

It is amazing that AB even still exists given the enormous losses it has stacked up over so many years now, and it;s very sad to see it now, compared to the heady days 15-odd years ago when Joachim Hunold was honing it into a real competitor to the likes of Ryanair and Easyjet.

Where did it all go wrong? Was it on Hunold's watch, when he was turning the carrier into a low-cost, but high service business carrier, alongside it's traditional leisure business, or was it as a result of taking on LTU, and getting into long haul?

Hopefully AB will get sorted out and continue to operate on it's own account, rather than become another Lufthansa Group "brand".

"turning the carrier into a low-cost, but high service business carrier, alongside it's traditional leisure business, or was it as a result of taking on LTU, and getting into long haul?"

all things FR & EY have avoided and which have led many other airlines to disaster

I am sure I saw an advert for Cabin Crew based at LGW for Air Berlin yesterday. Not sure why, didn't even know they operated in to LGW.

Could it be referring to LGW, the German regional airline which operates exclusively for Air Berlin?

They are actively hiring and amazingly experienced people are joining them. The view seems to be that they will be taken over by Lufthansa / Eurowings. There seems to be a sort of perverse logic that if you are in enough financial trouble, then merger and monopoly rules are viewed differently. Certainly it is amazing to see what has happened to the share price in the last days, particularly if the rumours of a bad bank strategy are true.

Indeed, LGW operate DHC-8s on behalf of Air Berlin in Air Berlin livery.

lederhosen - the EU has a formal policy whereby if one company in a merger/acquisition would very likely go bankrupt, then the normal competition rules simply do not apply. The basic idea being that it's better to keep jobs in the EU than let non-EU competitors benefit. Of course the EU never wants to be criticised in the press for letting thousands of people lose their jobs for following rules. Thus if Lufthansa Group were to buy large chunks of Air Berlin, Brussels would very likely give permission with little or no conditions

David thanks for confirming that. The rather minimal interest in this huge issue still surprises me. Nothing is black and white, Hunold was a fantastic marketeer and created a great brand. Air Berlin has provided well paid cockpit jobs. But a lot of the other stuff is classic Harvard business school case material.

You mention the "well paid cockpit jobs". Does this to some extent explain the problem?

Ryanair and Easyjet, especially the former, are notorious for poor employment practices, but it has enabled them to become true "low cost" airlines. Did AB have the same ambitions, but simply, to make that model succeed, they should have clamped down on high personnel costs in the same way that the more successful low-cost carriers have?

Please do not take this the wrong way, I disagree with some of the more extreme employment examples of staff cost cutting, but is it a harsh reality that if you want to deliver what clearly the public want, cockpit and cabin crews costs have to be firmly controlled?