Brussels Airlines cancels 148 flights to/from European destinations in June and July – SWISS also affected by staff shortages

Brussels Airlines cancels 148 flights to various European destinations in June and July, VRT news channel and De Standaard newspaper announced on Wednesday.

In the course of June and July, 74 rotations will be removed from the Brussels Airlines flight schedule over a period of five weeks. In concrete terms, this amounts to 148 one-way flights. “This was at the request of our aircrew. They were concerned about the workload this summer,” says Brussels Airlines spokeswoman Maaike Andries. By way of comparison, this summer there are 200 daily round trip flights scheduled with Brussels Airlines.

It concerns flights to European destinations. No destinations will be deleted, but frequencies will be reduced. Brussels Airlines hopes to meet the demand from staff to reduce the workload, says Andries. “Such relief from the schedule comes at a cost, but we are doing this because the staff have indicated it is too heavy.”

“We have looked at flights for which there are sufficient alternatives,” says Andries. Less than 1 percent of the passengers are affected. “We will proactively contact them and assign them an alternative flight. This can be with Brussels Airlines itself, or with one of our sister companies,” Andries added.

It remains to be seen whether this move by Brussels Airlines management will satisfy the trade unions which were complaining about the excessive workload and prevent the strike announced by the pilots. A reconciliation meeting between unions and management on Tuesday failed to provide an agreement.

SWISS also cancels flights

Brussels Airlines is not the only airline that has to adjust to the summer season. SWISS also announced on Tuesday that it would cancel flights due to a shortage of staff. The Keystone-SDA news agency quoted a SWISS spokeswoman as saying the reasons were “bottlenecks at air control centres, ground and airport services in Europe and at SWISS”.

SWISS will cut five weekly flights between Nuremberg and Zurich between July and October, and in July and August the number of flights between Berlin and Zurich will be reduced from 48 to 44 per week, and between Stuttgart and Zurich it will go from 13 to 10. SWISS also cancels one long-haul flight between Zurich and San Francisco per week. Flights to Vienna over the summer months will be operated by sister company Austrian Airlines.

Staff shortages also present elsewhere

The staff shortage in the aviation sector is also visible elsewhere. In recent weeks there have been many delays and cancelled flights at Schiphol airport and at various British airports as a result of the shortages. During the corona pandemic, staff were laid off en masse and now the sector is struggling to recruit new people.