Ómicron causes the cancellation of more than 5,000 flights worldwide

The omicron variant has hit the staff of the big airlines Y caused the cancellation of more than 5,000 flights worldwide during the days of Christmas Eve and Christmas, when millions of people travel to reunite with their families.

At 4:00 p.m. EST (9:00 p.m. GMT), 5,048 flights had already been suspended on Christmas Eve and ChristmasWhile 17,954 had suffered last-minute delays, according to the US company Flight Aware, which specializes in providing real-time data on air traffic.

More than a quarter of the flights canceled during Christmas Eve and Christmas had as their destination or starting point the United States, where cases have grown 50% in the last week after the overwhelming advance of omicron.

Christmas Eve, one of the busiest days of the year, has already begun with the suspension of hundreds of itineraries; But the situation worsened as the day progressed, and at Christmas, major US airlines such as Delta and United announced more cancellations.

In a statement, Delta said it was “exhausting all options and all resources,” including route changes, aircraft replacement and crew changes, to cover its scheduled operations.

However, on Christmas Eve, Delta had to suspend 173 or 8% of its routes and, by 4:00 p.m. local time on Christmas Day, travelers on 308 flights (15%) had already been grounded.

For its part, United canceled 201 (10%) of the routes it had planned for Christmas Eve and this Christmas Saturday the figure already reaches 240 (12%).

The impact of the omicron on crews

A United spokeswoman, Maddie King, told Efe this Saturday that the increase in omicron infections in the United States is having a “direct impact” on flight crews and the rest of the company’s personnel, that you have to stay home to recover from the disease and not infect others.

For its part, Delta has attributed the cancellations to omicron, but also to meteorological conditions with snow storms that threaten the western US, from Washington state to southern California.

However, other US airlines such as American and Southwest have assured that their operations are developing normally and have hardly experienced cancellations.

Those two airlines, though, yeah they had to suspend hundreds of trips at the end of October.

For its part, the German Lufthansa reported on Friday the cancellation of several transatlantic routes during the Christmas holidays due to a “massive increase” in sickness deaths among its pilots, local media reported.

Other international airlines such as China Eastern and Air China, as well as Indonesian low-cost carrier Lion Air and state-owned Air India also dropped thousands of passengers on the ground on Christmas Eve and Christmas, according to Flight Aware.

A pulse between US managers and unions

In the United States, behind the cancellations, there is a fight between the managers of the big airlines and the unions.

Anticipating potential problems, lobby group Airlines for America, representing Delta, United and American, sent a letter Thursday to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, to ask you to relax the guidelines of that institution on the isolation period that those who have been exposed to the virus must comply with.

Currently, the CDC advises a 10-day isolation, but Airlines for America wants it to be a maximum of five.

In response, the union of flight attendants, known as AFA, asked Walensky in another letter that the ten days of isolation be maintained and considered that any change in the protocols should be based on science, not on personnel problems. .

In fact, personnel problems are not new. During the pandemic, the big US airlines received public aid of 54,000 million dollars on the condition that they could not fire anyone.

However, what they did to save costs was to reduce staff with voluntary redundancies or early retirement, so that when the demand for flights recovered this year, they found that there were not enough employees to cover all routes.

Increase in travelers

While airlines struggle to maintain their flight plans, most US travelers have continued with their plans to travel this holiday by other means, as reflected by data from the US Transportation Security Administration. . (TSA, for its acronym in English).

Specifically, some 2.2 million people passed through US airports on Thursday, just before Christmas Eve, which is almost the same as in 2019 and three times more than last year.

The omicron variant has caused an increase in infections around the world and has caused some European countries, such as Germany, Portugal and Finland, to re-impose restrictions on the leisure and hospitality sectors. (I)