Podcast: How Strikes Disrupted Airlines' Best Laid Plans

Air Canada’s flight attendant walkout grounded hundreds of flights and will have significantly dented its quarterly financials, while European airlines have faced disruption from French air traffic control strikes. In this episode, Aviation Week editors explore how strikes are reshaping airline operations, finances and carrier optics.

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David Casey: Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for Window Seat, our Aviation Week air transport podcast. I'm David Casey, editor-in-chief of Routes. Welcome aboard. On this week's episode, we'll be taking a look at some of the labor disputes that are once again dominating the headlines, grounding flights, disrupting passengers, and testing the resilience of airlines on both sides of the Atlantic. In Canada, travelers have endured days of disruption over the past week after thousands of Air Canada flight attendants walked out, causing hundreds of flight cancellations and leaving passengers stranded both domestically and overseas. Meanwhile, in Europe, travelers have been contending with several strikes this summer. Finnair has faced major disruption in Helsinki, first from pilots and then from airport ground staff, while the routine air traffic control strikes in France have caused ripple effects far beyond French borders. To discuss some of the labor challenges that are affecting airline operations, I'm delighted to be joined by my colleague Lori Ranson, who covers North America and Latin American carriers for Aviation Week, and also serves as senior analyst at CAPA, and Victoria Moores, Europe and Africa bureau chief at Air Transport World. Thank you both for being here.

Lori then, in Canada it's been quite a week. I think we've had about 700 Air Canada flights a day grounded by industrial action. Obviously, a huge number, especially during a peak summertime, which is one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Can you just start us off by bringing us up to speed on this cabin crew dispute? What's the background to it and where are we right now?

Lori Ranson: Sure. So, the last cabin crew contract was negotiated in 2014, and management and flight attendants represented by CUPE, which is the Canadian Union of Public Employees, had been negotiating for about eight months. And earlier in August, flight attendants opted to conduct a strike vote, and CUPE members voted overwhelmingly to strike if talks hit an impasse. What was probably the major sticking point in negotiations is ground pay, which has emerged as a huge issue in flight attendant negotiations over the last few years. American now pays ground pay. Delta was the first out of the box to do so. A couple other US carriers now pay their attendants for time spent on the ground and boarding. And so, what happened is management came with an offer of 50% of an hourly rate for ground pay, which is typically what American and Delta pay. The flight attendants felt like other duties should be included in their ground pay, medical emergencies, security events, things of that nature.

And they also felt like management's offer, which was 38% pay raises over four years, actually didn't cover inflation in the first year. So, talks at impasse. Air Canada asked the government to step in, the government waited as long as it could, and when the government saw that they were very far apart in reaching an agreement, recommended binding arbitration. But we see that the flight attendants defied that order to go back to work twice, which is interesting. I don't know if it's necessarily surprising because government intervention in labor disputes in Canada has been a very high-profile issue. And I think this just sends the message that labor does not want government to interfere in collective bargaining, and I think ultimately define those back to work orders brought management back to the table to forge an agreement and resume operations. But again, it's going to take up to 10 days to get back to normal operations and it's just curious to watch this all unfold because is the financial hit worth it? Is the tarnishing of Air Canada's image with customers worth it? And I think we'll see that play out over the coming months.

David Casey: So, I'm right in saying during this strike action there was about 10,000 cabin crew members actually went out on strike. As you say, they defied that return to work. What has that meant, though, for Air Canada's operations? I understand it was about 700 flights a day that was canceled. What has been the scale of the cancellations, the delays, the disruption both domestically and internationally, and how challenging is it going to be now for Air Canada to restore those full operations given many of its aircraft and crew were out of position?

Lori Ranson: Yeah, you're exactly right. So, it seems like over 500,000 passengers affected; more than 2,000 flights canceled. Cabin crews stranded overseas, passengers stranded overseas. Air Canada tried to do an orderly sort of unwinding of operations, anticipating a strike. They did something similar last year, if you recall; pilots almost went on strike, their pilots almost went on strike and they sort of did the same thing. They kind of said, we're going to wind down our operations over three days. So, customers, as much advanced notice as they could get ,Air Canada try to warn customers that we're going to shut down operations, we’re had impasse. But still mean there's going to be a high cost for Air Canada. One analyst estimated, this was prior to the strike beginning, 75 million Canadian dollars a day in EBITDA, 300 million EBITDA for a three-day strike. Air Canada has suspended its financial guidance for 2Q  and its stock price has tumbled. So, if you take a step back, they're paying a pretty high price for this strike. And like you said, it's summer high season and how do you recover? You also made a point that its demand in transborder markets is down. And so there's been a big domestic push. And again, the timing of the strike couldn't have been at a worse time for Air Canada and Canadians.

David Casey: You're right, and it's come at a time as well when Canada is having to contend with that drop in transborder traffic. So, it's taking a financial hit there and then it's obviously got this financial hit on top. I mean, how financially damaging could this strike prove to be for the airline?

Lori Ranson: I think it's tough to get into specifics of financials, but I think you could assume that profitability in the second quarter is going to take a huge hit and the second quarter is typically a strong quarter for Air Canada and North American carriers because it's the summer high season. So again, I just feel like the timing of this couldn't be worse for everyone involved.

David Casey: Do you think with passengers as well, you said that more than half a million passengers have been affected by this—Air Canada obviously is a dominant player in the Canadian market, I think it accounts for about 40% of the total capacity—do you think customers will forgive and forget or do you think this is going to undermine the trust of Air Canada in the longer term?

Lori Ranson: Well, it's very interesting. I don't think they can forgive and forget because Air Canada is the dominant airline, and so there's little choice in terms of how you want to plan your travel around Air Canada or not take Air Canada in the future. So, I think sometimes these disruptions are a bit short-lived, especially if you are an airline and you get some discounting in with customers. I think sometimes customers just can forget if they can find a good deal. And Canada is unique, as we've talked about, just because of Air Canada's position. There's little choice, especially for long-haul travel. Air Canada's the dominant carrier in long-haul travel from Canada. So, if you want to plan a trip, it's very hard to avoid Air Canada.

David Casey: Definitely. Well, Victoria, you and I are both here in the UK and within Europe we no stranger to industrial action affecting airline operations. I think this year we've had some walkouts across different parts of the system from airlines to airports to air traffic control. But has the summer 2025 season stood out in terms of the scale and impact of strikes in Europe compared to previous years?

Victoria Moores: Yeah, David, coming into this summer, what we were hearing from some airline CEOs was that this summer was potentially going to be even worse than previous summers, that they were anticipating operations to be very, very tight and obviously more air traffic control delays. My personal experience of this summer has been that actually compared with previous years, it doesn't seem to have been as bad, but I think that there's a couple of exceptions to that. The first one of those is Finnair. Finnair was hit by two sets of industrial action in very quick succession, and that was in June and July. So initially they had a walkout among their pilots. They've been negotiating since back in August last year, talks obviously reached a stalemate, things escalated, the pilots took some strike action. I think that at one point they were estimating that that was going to have cost some $34 million in lost revenue.

It was going to take about 5% of their full-year capacity out as a result of that action. And I think about 2,000 flights, 200,000 passenger journeys were impacted. So, they took that impact from the pilot's walkout, they just resolved things with their pilots, and then there was a ground handling dispute at their hub airport at Helsinki, and that was anticipated that it would cause even more disruption than the pilots. Now that was finally resolved. They reached an agreement in mid-July, but obviously having those two sets of industrial action back-to-back will have hurt Finnair, which is already under quite a lot of pressure. Finnair used to have a very strong network focus on Asia. It had to rework that focus as a result of losing Russian overflight because of the conflict in Ukraine. And obviously they're taking that impact from all kinds of directions considering they've had to reinvent their business and having these industrial problems. Now, the second challenge that we have in Europe is obviously air traffic control. Because of that conflict that I mentioned, air traffic control capacity is a lot thinner than it has been in previous years, and obviously traffic is growing. So that's putting the whole system under a lot of strain. And what we keep hearing from various airlines is that French air traffic control is one particular challenge, which is really causing problems for the whole of European aviation.

David Casey: And with French air traffic control strikes, I think we had two days in early July. What was the impact of those strikes on the European system?

Victoria Moores: So those two days that you mentioned, David, they affected, this is EUROCONTROL numbers, they affected more than 1 million passengers. Around 200,000 people were unable to fly, 1,422 cancellations on each strike day. And to put those numbers in context, because it can be hard to imagine, that's 4.7% of all scheduled flights and EUROCONTROL estimates that that costs European aviation about €47 million in delay costs and €73 million in cancellation costs. So that's a total of €120 million. But I think it's quite important to see where France fits in the bigger picture because, again, I'm looking at the numbers from EUROCONTROL for the 11th to the 17th of August. And during that week in terms of flight activity, there are around 35,000 flights, which is about 4% up year on year. And of those flights there were 53,700-53,800 delayed. And when you look at the causes of those problems, France was responsible for 29% of all the delays in the network. So we're seeing obviously a very heavy congested system, but with France taking up about 30% of the delays, it's clear that that is a real area for progress.

David Casey: In terms of intervention from governments or from the EU, we've seen in Canada, they obviously stepped in with the Air Canada strike. We've heard from easyJet and Ryanair, they want the EU to take action with these air traffic walkouts. Is that momentum growing? What could the implications be if the EU does step in and take action against these strikes?

Victoria Moores: So yes, we've heard a lot of campaigning from the airlines trying to really seek for the core problem of air traffic control delays in Europe to be addressed. One of the challenges that we have is that a lot of those calls are pushed towards the European Union, but there's a question of sovereignty here. So, each European member state has its own sovereignty of its own airspace, and that to a degree limits what impact the European Commission is able to have on these specific problems. But then what you see is a batting backwards and forwards of who's the one that should do something about this. And I think noticeably this year, we've heard a lot from Ryanair. They're a very vocal low-cost airline. They seem to be calling for everybody involved in air traffic control to resign every time there are complications with the system.

But they're really trying to highlight and push forward this issue, particularly to the public, by naming and shaming the areas of Europe, which have got the worst problems calling personally on the individuals involved in running these services to resign, calling even at one point for the president of the European Commission to resign. So there's never any shortage of action from Ryanair, but I think the thing is that this issue does need to be highlighted and tackled because as much as its focused from the European institutions on improving the system under the single European sky in Europe, pushing forward the sustainability agenda, while you've got underperforming air traffic management in Europe, it's technically an easy win for emissions to get that sorted. But politically it's incredibly difficult.

David Casey: But Lori, what realistically can airlines do to mitigate the impact of these strikes? It's obviously difficult enough and it's their own operations as we've seen with Air Canada, but when this disruption comes from external groups like air traffic control or airport staff, is there anything that carriers can do to protect their schedules and make sure that their networks actually run on time and they can cancel as few flights as possible?

Lori Ranson: I do think that they can sort of reorient crews, have employee reserves, cancel flights accordingly to mitigate the operational impact. So, there are things that can be done, but obviously they prefer not to deal with the disruptions in the first place. So I think that sort of goes back to Victoria's point, that it's a politically tricky issue, but I think industry and governments need to come together and try and mitigate these disruptions, because at the end of the day, it's a tarnish on the industry when passengers can't get to their destinations or they're delayed or they're canceled, and the airline is the face of that.

David Casey: Do you see these strikes as isolated disputes just tied to individual airlines or are part of something deeper? Is it structural tensions within the industry linked to staffing shortages from the pandemic or cost of living pressures? Are we looking at a short-term flare up or is it a sign of longer term instability in airline labor relations? What do you think, Victoria?

Victoria Moores: Yeah, I think that perhaps a part of the reason for things being a little more comparatively stable in Europe this summer is that the pandemic now is quite a long way behind us. It seems as though the labor contracts have been negotiated coming out of that. Prior to that, a lot of airlines had really tried to do a lot of work on their cost base. So, they'd already negotiated in and tied in those collective labor agreements before then. I think that part of the Finnair issue was that the labor unions were still trying to make up from pandemic concessions, but that seems to be getting less and less. In terms of European mitigations, what I've heard from the airlines is that because this is beyond their control, they are bringing in quite a large number of spare aircraft. I'm talking about the larger operators.

I think one low-cost carrier said that they had about seven or nine spare aircraft as backups for their network to try and maintain that operational resilience. And they're also trying to lean quite hard into AI to try and really smooth those operations and keep everything running. And particularly in Europe, keeping everything running smoothly with passenger rights rules, the level of compensation that you have to pay, that's hugely important. But so is the reputation. When you're looking at the news, you're seeing passengers lying on terminal floors in big queues in the terminal. It's just not good for the whole of the industry. Back to Lori's point about this being something about the perception of aviation in a broader context rather than the one airline that might be affected.

David Casey: And looking ahead then to the rest of the year, what will this Canada situation mean, do you think, Lori, for other airlines in Canada? I know WestJet, I think they have more negotiating to do with CUPE. Has the Air Canada strike set a precedent and do you expect to see more labor disputes remaining a recurring feature in Canada?

Lori Ranson: Yes, as you said, I think WestJet is going to be very important to watch. I believe the collective bargaining agreement expires in December of this year. So, it will be interesting to see if future negotiations, particularly future flight attendants’ negotiations, follow this Air Canada playbook—have a strike vote, get to the 11th hour, refuse to broker an agreement, actually follow through on the strike, and then defy back to work orders. That seemed to be pretty effective in getting Air Canada back to the bargaining table. So that's going to be interesting to see. WestJet management may decide to be more proactive after the situation occurred and perhaps offer boarding pay upfront in negotiations to stave off major disruption. The optics of having two major strikes in Canada within a couple years aren't that positive. So, I do think that this is going to be very important to watch. WestJet is Canada's second largest airline, so having disruption at the second largest airline in such a short period of time, I don't think is something that airline management wants to see.

David Casey: Watch this space then in Canada, and I suppose from a passenger perspective, they'll have to be prepared for potential strikes in the future. Well, I think that's all we have time for this week's episode of Window Seat. Thanks to Lori and Victoria for joining me and sharing their insights into this recent industrial action. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to like or subscribe to Window Seat on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening, and thanks always to our producer, Cory Hitt. Until next time, this is David Casey disembarking from Window Seat.