After days of all-out travel chaos for Air Canada passengers and Canadian travel advisors, the flight attendant strike is finally over. CUPE, the flight attendant union, has issued a back-to-work order pending ratification of the agreement reached early this morning after 9 hours of mediation.
The question now is “when will my client’s flight be confirmed?”
Air Canada says it will gradually resume flights as of this evening, 19AUG, but restarting an airline with aircraft parked around the world will take time. Not only do they need crews, but maintenance is a priority after days of being grounded.
"Customers are advised that the airline’s return to full, regular service may require seven-to-ten days as aircraft and crew are out of position. During this process, some flights will be cancelled over the next seven to ten days until the schedule is stabilized," Air Canada stated in a news release.
“Only customers with confirmed bookings whose flights are shown as operating should go to the airport."
In a weekend Open Jaw exclusive, Air Canada Executive VP and COO Mark Nasr outlined how the airline is likely to prioritize the re-start of its flight schedule.
"So the restart is going to be gradual, and we’re going to take it one step at a time, and we’re going to do it as quickly as we can. But the reality is it’s difficult and requires the entire Air Canada team, and we need to make sure of course first and foremost, we do it in a safe matter," Nasr said.
"We’re going to focus on getting the international flights out first simply because we need the crews to arrive at their destination to be able to get their rest to come back. And, of course on the international flights you have a lot of people connecting to domestic lags, transporter lags. That’s a priority as well."
In an interview with CTV News, McGill professor John Gradek said, “We’re still going to get a couple hundred thousand passengers with flight cancellation over the next 48 hours. But that should come down quite a bit over the next few days.”
“Hopefully Air Canada will have the ability to accommodate, not only its current passengers, but will recover and rescue stranded passengers.”
Robert Kokonis, President of AirTrav, agrees that restarting operations is a huge challenge.
In an interview with Open Jaw, Kokonis said "running a scheduled airline is like conducting a symphony orchestra. There are so many moving parts. There’s the obvious ones, the flight crews plus the pilots. The aircraft themselves getting everything back in position. But there’s also the machinists, the check in and gate agents."
"Air Canada’s hoping to get some flights back on tonight. They’re going to get flights on short haul like Toronto/Montreal, and maybe some trans-continentals, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver in place. But I would say it’s going to take between 6 and 7, even 8 days to get everything back."
Details of the tentative agreement between Air Canada and its flight attendants are not available. However, in its release early this morning, CUPE called the agreement they reached "historic" and "transformational" for the industry. "Unpaid work is over," they said.
On CP24, John Gradek said “This was inevitable. I don’t think Air Canada could have withstood the pressure that was coming from its own flight attendants, and the other industry carriers that had moved in this direction as well. And the Minister of Jobs basically, who is starting to do a bit of an inquiry into these job practices of working and not being paid.”
“The only question right now is the structure. How much are they going to pay the flight attendants? Is it going to be the full salary as they get on the airplane today? And when do you start the clock? Do you start the clock when they walk in the building, or do you start the clock 30 or 40 minutes before the flight?”
Around 130,000 pax per day around the world have been affected by the strike, and their travel advisors left picking up the pieces. Typically, Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge operate 700 flights a day.
