Lufthansa cancels 140 flights on Friday

FRANKFURT: Deutsche Lufthansa AG canceled about 140 flights on Friday as a result of a strike over pay by pilots at its CityLine subsidiary.

The Cockpit union started its 36-hour walkout at midnight (2200GMT) Wednesday and ended it at noon (1000GMT).

Friday's cancelations followed the scrapping of some 360 flights on Thursday. CityLine operates on domestic German and European routes.

The company said it did everything it could to keep disruptions at a minimum for passengers, putting them onto other flights and on trains.

The strike followed a walkout last month by Cockpit pilots at CityLine and another short-haul subsidiary, Eurowings, that forced Lufthansa to cancel about 1,000 flights.

Lufthansa CEO Wolfgang Mayrhuber has argued that strikes threaten the company's competitiveness and, therefore, jobs and has urged Cockpit to return to the negotiating table.

In an interview with the daily Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung published Friday, he maintained that the pilots already earn about 20 to 25 per cent more than their counterparts at comparable regional airlines.

Still, the union stuck to its guns. Senior Cockpit official Ilona Ritter said that ``we expect a signal from Lufthansa CityLine'' and declined to rule out further walkouts. She also rejected the idea of arbitration.

Cockpit is looking for more than Lufthansa's existing offer of a 5.5 per cent raise plus one-time payments.

Separately, ground staff staged a five-day strike last week. That was resolved when Lufthansa and the ver.di service workers' union reached a pay deal a week ago; since then, the airline has been working to clear a maintenance backlog and get all its planes back in service.

Shares of Lufthansa were up 2.5 percent Friday at euro15.69 (US$24.19) in late Frankfurt trading Friday.