interesting....

https://www.eurocockpit.be/news/good...thank-you-mess

The insolvency administrator has urged the pilots on strike to show up for work - if not, he will have to ground the airline at short notice and close the shop for good.

is Fly Niki trying to save itself ?

So the Pilots throw a sickkie and the Airline in even more stress than it is already. The Airline goes bust and without doubt the Pilots will be the ones who get jobs - might not be where they want to be - whilst the Ground Staff end up on the rock n roll. #great

Effectively, it already has. The pilots have nothing to lose. And let's be honest, would the ground personnel care about the pilots if the shoe was on the other foot?

Would be interesting to know why Aer-Cap pulled the plug.

All the bids have to be in by Friday. Maybe no one wants the long haul business so they have dumped it and its AB that have pulled the plug and not Aer-Cap

The irony is that from the limited funds airberlin has available, the pilots are the only ones who get money from those funds - while salaries at the moment are paid by an insolvency fund and not the employer, airberlin has to pay the balance for all salaries that exceed a statutory cap - and these are the salaries of the better earning pilots.

At least one airline I know of who is involved are going to be asking for records and opinions on crews before offering them joining interviews. They are not going to be automatically taking everyone and so calling a sickie might not be the wisest move right now...

I have not had to deal with an employer going bankrupt (yet...), but I can hardly imagine how much stress this puts on all of the staff. How will they pay their bills and mortgages, what will happen in a month, three months, six months, etc.

I would expect (and hope) that many pilots who do not have a significant other that makes a good living individually and/or a large stash of cash saved for such situations would be under huge amounts of stress and should be calling in sick in this type of situation where you know your employer is bankrupt and you have no idea where you will end up, yet you are still expected to go to work every day as if nothing were amiss.

Each and every employee of AB knew this was coming. I seriously doubt this is hurting the crew out of the blue wrt bills and mortgages.

Apparently some have also have been told the conditions of the LH "rescue". Pilots not going to have LH contracts but Eurowings ones = 40% less for an AB Captain + Uncertainty about the A330s .
I understand from the media here that it is almost only Captains calling in sick. Same today apparently.
VC Cockpit not behind it.

How killing off their present company will help that? Either they take the -40% or won't be employed and can go to China. They do not cause trouble for a functional company (which would be the point of a strike to reach something) only expedite the sealed fate of a wreck. Who cares if it happens tomorrow or in 3 months other than themselves as the employees of the said wreckage?

On wonders how it took so long. Some years ago AB had some very strange looking policies, from the outside. They dubbed a large number of flights via PMI or Berlin. I could buy an AB local ticket from ABC to TFS but I had to stop off in PMI, when I could buy a local ticket with local competition on a direct flight for less money. Guess which was there choice. Unless you were in PMI or Berlin there were not many interesting direct flights within EU; or so it seemed.
Then, at one time, before the long-haul crazy adventure, they were operating (I think) 4 different short-haul types when the competition were all operating single types and obviously lower cost. How could they compete and survive with that business model. Did they not then buy LTU long-haul routes and venture over the horizon before they had consolidated their short-haul base? And they were trying to offer a premium short-haul service for LoCo prices and a high cost base.
It did not seem a recipe for success many years ago. And I don't think pilot salaries had anything to do with the demise. It seemed a daft business plan years ago at a time when the strong contenders were consolidating their own cost bases & business model.

I think there is a misconception about the "Lufthansa" rescue. "Lufthansa" as the group of companies wants to come to the rescue, not "Lufthansa" as the airline. Lufthansa is a global company brand that includes something like a dozen separate airlines, only one of which is Lufthansa the airline (plus dozens of other non-airline companies). So it is a bit fanciful to assume by airberlin employees that they will be employed subject to the contract conditions of the Lufthansa group airline that pays the highest salaries. No sane investor in a bancrupt company would do that.

They are getting paid for three months from an insolvency fund and so should be fine. Just like almost anyone else, pilots are not career civil servants with guaranteed lifelong employment, so redundancy is a risk they share with all employees who have to pay bills, mortgages.

Calling in sick is reportedly a small group of captains on very generous former LTU contracts. They are not taking the "we enjoyed it while it lasted" (i.e. for decade since LTU disappeared) approach, but expect to keep the conditions with a future employer. With is quite understandable from their perspective - but realistically, they are not the ones calling the shots. What they apparently fear is that because of their fat cat salaries airberlin and the potential investor want to get rid of them by way of closing down longhaul ops which would give airberlin the opportunity to make them lawfully redundant before the company is taken over by someone else. Bit like brushing up the high maintenance bride...

The amount of money guaranteed however is less than half of the normal salary for pretty much all pilots at air berlin. So no, their pay isn't guaranteed.

Again, not entirely correct. Yes, there are quite a few ex LTU captains in that group, but they are not alone there by far. And they do not have better contracts than the rest of the airberlin pilots, in fact the last LTU contract is around 40% less pay than the current airberlin contract. And since airberlin has no exclusive longhaul fleet but rather only MFF (mixed fleet flying) there is no way one can fire only those old LTU guys, however, prospective buyers of parts of the company could of course cherry pick, which they cannot anymore if a normal germany procedure called Sozialauswahl (social selection) would be followed. And the sick out is only about going into that social selection procedure, which is governed by employment law.

Doesn't airbelrin cover the balance between the agreed salary and the statutory cap in order to stop the pilots from leaving the sinking ship?

So bottom line is that it is about one group of pilots against the other? And those on strike would rather sink the whole ship than keep it afloat if as a result the other group of pilots has better chances to get hired? I don't see how management can cave in here - if the striking pilots get their will, the majority of non-striking pilots will see their chances of employment with an investor shrinking.

A bit harsh of anyone to come on here to call out any AB crews trying to maintain their T&Cs given the strike record of LH's crews over the past couple of years.

Well, last time I checked Lufthansa never stood on the edge of the cliff...

The situation is hardly comparable.
The striking pilots are playing a very dangerous game IMHO - I understand that they might only have bad choices but it could backfire quite violently...

Agreed.....

But was it 14 or 15 or 16 strikes over the past couple of years and always about their own T&Cs....Never about the poorer T&Cs in other Lufthansa Group Companies such as Aerologic, Tyrolean, Eurowings, etc.

And let's be honest, AB fell off the cliff months or even years ago - it isn't stood on the edge and, as always, hardly anything to do with or fault of the crews.

This gives me no great pleasure, but....

https://centreforaviation.com/insigh...16-loss-279882

Perhaps RAT5's post is closest. I remember thinking along the same lines several years ago. Their business model was basically a shambles from around the time they went for the PMI hub and their acquisition of LTU. I remember, at the time, flying DUS-MAD-DUS in their European Business Class for €280.00, and thinking it won't last.

The actual number of strikes was much less, because the tactics was "needle stitches".
Example:
Monday short haul, Tuesday long haul.
Some months later 6-12h clock long haul, the rest of the day short haul...
So the media (or public relations) just counted every fleet as another event.

And one can only strike for ones -own- collective agreement. It's illegal to strike for anything else.
That's the problem. Employer tries to outplay the different pilot groups against each other.
But Eurowings could strike as well, they have their own CA. Not Eurowings Europe though, their AOC is not even in Germany.

Btw. Aerologic is not a Lufthansa group airline whatsoever. They are just a joint venture with DHL and their pilots do not have a collective agreement / union representation. Their wages are freely negotiated. Neither can they switch companies within the group.

Actually, sympathy strikes are legal if certain guidelines are followed.

Except this was not a strike but individual people calling in sick.( or more correctly unfit to fly)
Big difference from a legal point of view.
I also understand that VC Cockpit is not supporting the action. So AB cannot even call it a collective action so I do not see AB going to court over this.

No, they won't. Because they know, even if there was a somewhat organized thing, that it wasn't the reasons for the cancellations. The sick rate for captains was 8% higher than the average, for FOs around 5%. That is well within the normal day to day variations. And the company did cancel flights where the crew was already on board and preparing to fly, for no apparent reason.

Already six months ago they knew that they won't have enough pilots for the september schedule, and that got worse three months ago when they decided to go from 60 to 75 minutes check in time and from 30 to 45 check out time starting 1st of september, which increased the crew demand considerably.

Apparently a huge operational problem was covered up by having a convenient scape goat.

Thanks for that inside info Denti. Sounds exactly to what the Spanish old ANSP (AENA) did with the controllers in Madrid some years ago. Diversion to hide a bigger problem and using the media to focus on easy "overpaid" targets . Sadly it worked .

It seems like that Niki Lauda is interested in Air Berlin

Former F1 champion Niki Lauda eyes parts of Air Berlin, Transport - THE BUSINESS TIMES

Busted flush
 

Lauda, along with other vultures, is looking to pick up "profitable" carrion.

None of those fools know what they are doing, just airline failures on their cv's.

CONDOR seems to be part of it as well :

http://www.avitrader.com/2017/09/14/...of-air-berlin/

Interesting post on the German PPRUNE - an insider claims that it is all a stitch-up and Lufthansa group has bought 10 of airberlin's A330-200 from AerCap in order to stall the interest from other investors in taking over airberlin inclusive of the long-haul ops. Another source alleges that IAG had been looking into that part of airberlin with the aim to expand Level. Depending on how the sale of airberlin itself works out, it is said that Lufthansa is planning to get Eurowings long-haul started at DUS with the help of Brussels Airlines (while until now Eurowings longhaul is exclusively operated by SunExpress)

The bids are in:
Mehrere Bieter für insolvente Air Berlin | Reuters

LH Group is offering a low 3 digit million € figure to get 70-90 aircraft, probably as a stand alone unit of A320 aircraft and crew to serve EW. Condor and Lauda are bidding for A320s, as is Easyjet. It doesn't look like anyone bid for the longhaul business, probably because of high LTU flight crew contracts. LH it seems made deals behind the scenes with Gecas and/or Aercap to take the A332 for EW longhaul.
Zeitfracht wants the LGW, Leisure Cargo and the MRO operation.
Utz Claasen, Wöhrl and Jonatan Pang each want to take over the airline completely... :D

There is no LTU flight crew deal. There is still one for the cabin crew though. The current flight crew deal is the air berlin one, which applies to all pilots, no matter from which company they originally came. There was a special deal for some high seniority FOs, however that is gone by now as well as they have been trained to be captains.

Anyway, longhaul is by now pretty much evenly operated by ex LTU and AB crews, and all of them are rated on both the A320 and A330.

An interesting aspect of Denti's point that AirBerlin has been undercrewed is that up to now there has been a significant monetary incentive for people to work on days off. But if you are not sure that you will ever see the money then why bother?

Stupid Pilots
 

Pilots calling sick just accelerates the end. Staff at Air Berlin are not happy with pilots ruining chances of successful takeover

IAG
 

It looks like IAG are interested in parts of Air Berlin as well:

AviTrader ? Lufthansa and IAG emerge as main contenders in bidding war for Air Berlin

The airberlin bankruptcy reached a new level of complexity and uncertainty, after a creditor filed an application to declare Austrian subsidiary NIKI bankrupt as well. The legal action, if successful, would likely torpedo previous rescue efforts and lead to the collapse of most, if not all, proposed transactions by potential investors to pick up parts of the airline. Once declared bankrupt, NIKI would lose its operating license and its airport slots, the basis on which bids have been made. ...

was Niki making money - they seemed an OK airline

What sort of bankruptcy?
 

Normal Bankruptcy or Alitalia style Euro Bankruptcy?