Strike Forces Cutting of Northwest Flights
Aug. 23–Northwest Airlines dropped three of its summer passenger flights to and from Alaska after mechanics went on strike Friday night, said company spokeswoman Jennifer Bagdade.
The airline runs an average of five daily flights between Anchorage and Minneapolis-St. Paul in the summer and three in the winter. It went to its winter schedule early after the strike started, Bagdade said. It also dropped a flight between Fairbanks and the Lower 48, she said.
Some 4,400 Northwest employees in the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association struck after eight months of negotiation, the union said. The airline has not released total delays or cancellations since then.
Many airlines are contracting out work to save money in the competitive air travel industry.
Northwest said it has the industry’s highest operating costs, has been losing $4 million a day and needs to cut $1.1 billion in yearly labor costs right away. The airline asked the mechanic union for $176 million in annual savings.
The airline proposed cutting the number of mechanics-union jobs by nearly half, the union said, and would not discuss a proposal to get the same savings with fewer job cuts.
Northwest said 46 of its 584 Alaska employees are with union, which represents mechanics, cleaners and custodians.
The airline said it started building a back-up plan, hiring temporary workers 18 months ago in case of a strike. No new contract talks are scheduled.
Northwest has a large year-round cargo operation at Anchorage’s international airport and runs several daily passenger flights out of Alaska, said airport spokeswoman Linda Close.
Northwest runs about 45 cargo flights per week through Anchorage, Close said, where the company has a 60,000-square-foot warehouse.
The airport will not know if August traffic was lighter until mid-September, she said, when companies hand over their monthly flight numbers.
Close said the airport does not monitor whether flights are on time.
Northwest flies Boeing 757 passenger jets and 747 cargo jets through Alaska, Bagdade said.
Northwest Airlines said it is the world’s fourth-largest airline, with hubs at Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Memphis, Tokyo and Amsterdam, and about 1,600 daily departures.
Bagdade said Northwest has line maintenance in Anchorage but did not say where heavy maintenance is performed.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees airlines maintenance and repair, has raised the number of inspectors watching Northwest from 46 to 80, agency spokesman Greg Martin told The Associated Press.
Not all are maintenance inspectors, however, said Professional Airways System Specialists, a union for FAA’s safety inspectors.
—–
To see more of the Anchorage Daily News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.adn.com.
Copyright (c) 2005, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.
NWAC, BA, 7661,