German airports brace for strike after Lufthansa’s day of chaos

Deutsche Lufthansa AG returned to a normal flight schedule on Thursday, offering only a short respite ahead of a planned strike that threatens to hobble operations at major airports across Germany.

The one-day walkout called by labor union Verdi is set to take place Friday at seven airports, including the country’s largest in Frankfurt and Munich. The action is another blow to Lufthansa, which had to ground its entire fleet Wednesday after workers damaged a set of cables that crippled its IT systems.

The warning strikes come amid slow progress in talks over pay and conditions for security and other ground staff. Verdi is seeking a significant boost to wages for workers hit by higher energy prices and record inflation.

Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s largest, expects the walkout to leave only emergency operations able to continue on Friday. More than 1,000 takeoffs and landings had been planned, and the airport would normally have served between 120,000 and 130,000 passengers that day. Airlines will likely cancel most flights, they said.

Munich Airport said it had applied to the regional government to close commercial operations on Friday, with exceptions for emergencies and the ongoing Munich Security Conference. The strikes, however, are bound to complicate travel for delegates attending the annual gathering of defense and foreign-policy makers. There will be no regular passenger flights at the airport, with more than 700 departures and arrivals canceled, a spokesperson said.

The Stuttgart airport also said no flights would be possible on Friday, while Hamburg, Hanover, Dortmund, and Bremen warned that service would be disrupted. 

Frankfurt and Munich are both Lufthansa hubs, promising more trouble for Europe’s biggest airline by fleet size. On Wednesday, workers had accidentally drilled through four cables buried some 16 feet (4.8768 meters) below ground in a suburb close to the Frankfurt airport, bringing down the carrier’s IT systems and grounding hundreds of flights.

Though Lufthansa said services were normalizing by late Wednesday, the incident raised questions about why backup systems hadn’t been able to handle the outage.