Nearly Thousand Lufthansa flights cancelled due to walk-out by pilots

Air travellers braced for chaos Monday as pilots for Lufthansa, Europe’s largest airline, began a four-day walkout that was expected to force the cancellation of thousands of flights.

The German flag carrier was operating a sharply reduced schedule that involved scrubbing roughly 800 out of 1,800 scheduled flights per day for the duration of the strike. A spokeswoman for the carrier said early Monday that the number of flights cancelled was likely to rise as the day wore on, as some pilots that had been scheduled to work through the strike were not showing up.

“We have already had a few additional cancellations this morning,” said the spokeswoman, Stefanie Stotz.

The airline said most of the cancelled flights were on domestic German routes, where Lufthansa was offering to rebook passengers on trains to their destinations. For European and intercontinental flights, the carrier said it was re-booking passengers whenever possible with its partners within the Star Alliance. Lufthansa said it planned to maintain all flights on routes where it has no airline partners.

The Cockpit Association union, which represents about 4,500 pilots at Lufthansa and its subsidiaries — Lufthansa Cargo and Germanwings, a no-frills carrier — voted last week to strike after failing to secure guarantees from the airline that it would not seek to migrate cockpit jobs to the company’s foreign subsidiaries such as Austrian Airlines and British Midland, which pay their flight crews less.

Lufthansa argues that the number of its pilots in Germany has increased by 20 percent since 2001, due to the expansion of its network through acquisitions and new airline partnerships. The airline last week offered pilots assurances that their jobs would be secure through at least 2012.

Last-minute efforts over the weekend to avert the strike were unsuccessful. The German transport minister, Peter Ramsauer, brokered a series of telephone calls between Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Lufthansa’s chief executive, and Winfried Streicher, Cockpit’s president, but the two sides were unable to agree on ground rules for re-opening negotiations.

Both the union and the airline expressed the hope that talks could resume on Monday.

A Cockpit spokesman said pilots planned a demonstration at Frankfurt International Airport, where Lufthansa has its main hub.

Lufthansa has estimated the cost of the strike at around €25 million, or $34 million, per day.