Black day for Lufthansa travelers. Due to the pilots’ strike announced for Friday 2 September, the German airline canceled 800 flights mainly on the hubs of Munich and Frankfurt. The protest involves around 130,000 passengers who were asked not to go to the airport but to rebook their flight on another day or to take the train where possible. The Swiss, Austrian, Brussels and Eurowings subsidiaries are not affected by the strike.
A very different mood in Ryanair, the Irish low cost airline that carried 16.9 million passengers in August, 52% more than a year ago, while the load factor, the fill factor, rose to 96% from ‘ 82% a year ago. In the 12 months to August, 148 million passengers traveled on the air carrier compared to 44 million in the same period a year ago.