Aer Lingus to cancel up to 20% of flights from Wednesday

Aer Lingus will cancel up to one in five flights from next Wednesday in response to planned industrial action by its pilots.

Members of the Irish Airline Pilots’ Association (Ialpa) plan a strict work to rule from June 26th in a move that could hit flights and passengers in their pursuit of a near 24 per cent pay increase.

The airline on Thursday said it will cancel between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of flights during the first five days of the action “to protect as many services as possible”.

Donal Moriarty, its chief corporate affairs officer, confirmed that this would affect between 22 and 44 flights a-day and from 4,000 to 8,000 passengers. Aer Lingus has 220 flights daily, carrying 40,000 customers, at this time of year.

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The company will release details of the actual flights cancelled over the next two days. Most of them will be on routes connecting the Republic’s airports with Europe, but some transatlantic services may also be hit.

“We want to emphasise that this is to protect as many of our services as possible,” Mr Moriarty said.

He explained that the pilots’ planned work to rule would have otherwise had unpredictable consequences, including last-minute flight cancellations.

Aer Lingus will give passengers who have booked between Wednesday June 26th and Tuesday July 2nd the option of changing their flights for free. They can also cancel their flights and seek refunds, either cash or vouchers, an airline statement said.

From next Wednesday, Ialpa members in the Republic will only work according to published rosters, with no overtime or out-of-hours duties.

This will include not taking managers’ calls out of hours, not accepting changes to rosters and not fulfilling any requests to work out of hours. This will limit Aer Lingus’s ability to manage delays and other problems that arise regularly, particularly during this time of year.

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