Airlines, Airports, Americas, Asia, Europe, In the News, Weekly

This week: Cathay flight attendant’s protests, LCY’s emergency runway repairs & more

The pace has picked up this week and we saw quite a number of ‘delay relevant’ airport articles from around the world. Here’s our overview of those headlines we chose for this week’s review:

It wasn’t a strike yet, but Cathay Pacific flight attendants surely got heard this week. ABC News reported that they are protesting a cut to some cabin crew allowances, pay discrepancies for recently hired junior staff and a loss of legal support for workers involved in court cases such as civil action stemming from a passenger assault. The protesters said they plan to remain at the airport until the company responds to their demands. If it doesn’t, they said they would step up their actions. Two days later those actions were clarified in an article by The Wall Street Journal: The flight attendants’ union at Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. is threatening to strike during the peak travel season in August if the Hong Kong-based airline ignores its demands in a dispute over pay and benefits. This story will surely continue to evolve. When we heard the word ’emergency’ associated with London’s City Airport (LCY) we immediately thought of an accident or a flight in distress. However this week the emergency at the airport was about its runway. The Guardian reported that about 50 flights were cancelled at London City airport as emergency repairs were carried out on the runway. Airport officials said flights had resumed by late morning on Tuesday following hours of serious disruption for travellers, but there would be a knock-on effect for the rest of the day. One traveller tweeted his frustrations: https://twitter.com/smythmr/status/600562213829640193 Airport officials, however, denied the problem was due to a hole, but to an uneven surface that was the result of heavy use from planes landing at the busy airport, the article continued. And a London City airport spokesman said: “The runway is inspected each evening before we close around 10.30pm and it’s inspected again before we open around 6am. Today’s early inspection found there was a need for maintenance. There is not a hole in the runway but there is a surface problem. There are inconsistencies on the surface of the runway.” In Poland we heard via Bloomberg that local authorities are spending some 205 million zloty ($58 million), including more than $44 million in EU subsidies, to build runways and a new terminal that could accommodate more than 1 million passengers a year. The Olsztyn Mazury Airport (SZY) at Szymany is scheduled to open next January, but traffic and revenue forecasts developed by the project’s backers are “very far from reality,” says Jacek Krawczyk, a former chairman of LOT Polish airlines who advises the EU on aviation policy through its European Economic and Social Committee. He predicts the airport could close within 10 years. According to reports by European investigators—never formally confirmed by the U.S. or Polish governments—the CIA from 2002 to 2005 used clandestine charter flights to bring “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects to Szymany, where they were interrogated and tortured at a nearby detention center. And for our last featured article of the week we chose another gossip article for your entertainment. This week it came from WBTV that wrote that a man reportedly stripped naked in the Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) Wednesday morning after he became angry about a flight being overbooked. Police say he will not be facing charges. According to witnesses, the man was attempting to get on board a US Airways flight to Jamaica early Wednesday morning. “I seen some people running and I was wondering what they was running from and people were standing there snickering, so I walked over and [an airport employee] told me the man was angry over the Jamaican flight,” Sherry Ketchie told WBTV. The woman says the man was standing in the concourse naked for about an hour. Police confirmed they responded to a “disturbance call where a male was suffering from a medical issue.” They said the man was taken by Medic for treatment and will not be facing charges. That’s all for this week – safe travels! [Photo Credit: PaddingtonX via Compfight cc]