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?