Flight cancellations, wave of delays, damage to reputation: Lufthansa and its CEO Carsten Spohr are experiencing increasing turbulence. Millions of passengers groan under the mega chaos that has more than one cause. We name seven facts you should know about the flight disaster in Germany.
The Supervisory Board of the Lufthansa Group is holding a special meeting today. The all-dominant topic: the chaos at the airports and in German air traffic.
CEO Carsten Spohr has been targeted by his supervisory board members and his top customers. After the Germanwings crash, lockdown experience, state involvement and rising kerosene prices, he has to face renewed turbulence in his already turbulent career.
The finding is undeniable: there has not been such an unreliability in German air traffic since the Second World War. The passengers see themselves exposed to arbitrariness that has more than one cause. Only recently, the Head of Communications of the Banking Association, Oliver Santen, spoke up with his “insane travelogue”:
“Endless snakes. Snail’s pace.”
“You need nerves of steel to travel in the summer of 2022. And you have to be prepared for real unreasonable demands.”
For today’s Supervisory Board meeting, the Management Board had a precise graphic preparation of all external and internal problems created. Carsten Spohr, who recently personally apologized to his passengers in a letter, relies on transparency in crisis communication. So here are the seven facts you should know about flight chaos in Germany:
The only thing that the supervisory board may not consider is the responsibility of the board of directors. At the moment, the supervisory boards may have the feeling that their top management is the plaything of higher powers. But of course the flight chaos is also related to the fact that the board has allowed flight operations to ramp up – without ensuring the corresponding capacities in the cabin and on the ground.
Conclusion: What will happen now, namely a thinning out of the flight plan in line with the reduced capacity, should have happened long ago. With each additional day of chaos, Lufthansa suffers severe reputational losses. When you thought of Herta Müller, you used to think of literature, but more recently of Lufthansa:
“There is no perspective for what constitutes life. Only frail facilities of the moment. And adjustments that don’t last to the next step.”
Matthias Baier is a member of the board of the pilots’ union Cockpit. As a pilot, he gets to experience the daily chaos at airports first-hand. His analysis:
“Every individual in this aviation system has been trying to get their costs under control during the pandemic. It’s taking revenge now.”
Like the Lufthansa boss, he also says that things are unlikely to get any better in the next few months:
“We’re all going to have to put on a thick skin.”
Gabor Steingart is one of the best-known journalists in the country. He publishes the newsletter The Pioneer Briefing. The podcast of the same name is Germany’s leading daily podcast for politics and business. Since May 2020, Steingart has been working with his editorial staff on the ship “The Pioneer One”. Before founding Media Pioneer, Steingart was, among other things, Chairman of the Management Board of the Handelsblatt Media Group. You can subscribe to his free newsletter here.
I also spoke to the aviation expert Heinrich Großbongardt – former head of communications at Boeing – about the situation at the airports. He also points to the board of Lufthansa:
“The Lufthansa Executive Board has a responsibility insofar as it scaled back significantly during the crisis. Education and training have also been reduced; Employees were laid off at a rate that was not conducive to rapid recovery. “
The airport operators are also to blame for the conditions:
“The airport operators have outsourced many tasks that used to be an integral part of airport work to service providers – with the proviso that production costs should be as low as possible. “
The good news: Research into the causes has begun. The bad: There is still a long way to go to normality. Or to quote Albert Camus:
“We must imagine Sisyphus as a happy man.”
